I've an ambivalent relationship with quotations.
Sometimes I find them empty. You put them in the middle of the lawn like garden gnomes and think they look good. But just as the garden gnome should stay in the imaginary land that doesn't exist in our real world to save our gardens from ugliness, quotes that you just put there often don't look any better: like a garden gnome in the middle of a well-mown lawn. If there was a garden gnome, it would have to live in the middle of a dark, mushroom-scented old forest; but not on your in-laws' mown lawn.
I hope you're following this analogy that I really went out of my way to find.
Nevertheless, a quote can have a profound effect on people, including me.
And so I came across this one from Goethe:
“The highest happiness of man ... is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.” 1
I love this quote for two reasons {{username}}.
The first is that humanity enjoys learning. We all like to know things. By the way, it is interesting that Maslow did not include the cognitive need in his famous pyramid when he designed it in 1970, but only later (in addition to the so-called aesthetic need).
The second reason I like this quote is that it embodies a deeply Stoic view of the world, to which, as you know, I adhere: There is what we know, what we study (the knowable), and what escapes us, what is beyond our understanding (the unknowable). And yet both are wonderful.
To "quietly to revere what is unknowable", as the German polymath of the 18th century poetically put it, means to trust life with all its surprises and uncertainties. For everything that we cannot comprehend isn't only beyond the reach of our understanding, but also holds an element of mystery which brings happiness to our lives.
This quote, in my opinion, beautifully connects what unites you and me:
the love of knowing, of understanding things, of seeking the truth
and
accepting what lies beyond our understanding.
You might be wondering why I included this quote in the "Don't worry" program? Well, because it reflects my Stoic way of thinking: the choice to believe that there is something beyond us, a Cosmic Order, a Universal Reason, as the Stoics call it, something intangible that gives meaning to what we know.