Incompleteness Quotes

“The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

“This ME
made whole by
combining countless fragments
could not live in any one part
with complete ease.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“The price for his intactness was incompleteness.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“True love is a developed and intense appreciation for someone. It’s that perfect awareness that you are finally whole when she’s with you, and that hollow incompleteness you suffer when she’s gone.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Eena, The Return of a Queen

“A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.”
― Paul Valéry

“We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.”
― Otto Neurath

“Death takes us by surprise,
And stays our hurrying feet;
The great design unfinished lies,
Our lives are incomplete
But in the dark unknown,
Perfect their circles seem,
Even as a bridge's arch of stone
Is rounded in the stream.
Alike are life and death,
When life in death survives,
And the uninterrupted breath
Inspires a thousand lives.
Were a star quenched on high,
For ages would its light,
Still traveling downward from the sky,
Shine on our mortal sight.
So when a great man dies,
For years beyond our ken,
The light he leaves behind him lies
Upon the paths of men.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us. This morning, the idea of the egg came again to my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid in those days of July and August 1940—for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the Universe? The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole. To possess a telescope without its other essential half—the microscope—seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.”
― Leonora Carrington, Down Below

“There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

“Thus the perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite, that is, my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself. For how would I understand that I doubt and that I desire, that is, that I lack something and that I am not wholly perfect, unless there were some idea in me of a more perfect being, by comparison with which I might recognize my defects?”
― René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

“I seriously believed I could escape myself–as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to defining myself.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“You are the completeness of my incompleteness.”
― Avijeet Das

“Instead of proving all possible theorems in an axiomatic system (which Kurt Gödel showed is not possible), professional mathematicians continue to use a formal presentation of mathematics to specify and prove many theorems that are amenable to the formalist paradigm. This has generated a vast corpus of formal theory.
Controversies continue unresolved. Some mathematicians continue to insist on giving explicit constructions of mathematical entities, and do not allow proof by contradiction. This is a valid approach in its own right with much to recommend it. In the end, however, the choice that is likely to lead to the greater conquests is the one that offers the greater power and at the moment, it is David Hilbert's formalism that continues to predominate, while steadily being expanded as mathematics expands."

-David Tall (2013, p. 246) thinks though Formalism (mathematics) may have Lost the Battle it Still may Win the War.”
― David Tall, How Humans Learn to Think Mathematically: Exploring The Three Worlds Of Mathematics

“Um pouco mais de sol - eu era brasa,
Um pouco mais de azul - eu era além.
Para atingir, faltou-me um golpe de asa...
Se ao menos eu permanecesse aquém...”
― Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Verso e Prosa

“I held her like tomorrow would not come. It stitched me, if only for a second...”
― Ahmed Mostafa

“Seul celui qui a achevé en esprit l'inachevé peut découvrir la véritable beauté. La vigueur de la vie et de l'art réside dans leurs possibilités de croissance.”
― Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea

“Thousands of incomplete writings are probably enough to represent the chaotic mind of mine!”
― Sakshi Mishra

“Gödel’s scheme has nothing to do with mathematics in and of itself. It concerns false approaches (i.e. non-ontological approaches) to the definition of what math is. The incompleteness theorems proved that such approaches are doomed to failure. Gödel didn’t prove a single thing about what math is. What he proved is what’s it’s not. He proved that it definitely isn’t manmade.”
― Mike Hockney, Gödel Versus Wittgenstein

“In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“A tragedy unveiled in its causality is but a tragedy incomplete; only in the shadow of uncertainty, where the root of suffering remains veiled, does the tragedy reach its poignant entirety.”
― Syed Buali Gillani

“But see, it can be said we endure together
The knowing in part, the fragmentation, as if it were the whole.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“The only contact we could have with the void was through this little the void had produced as quintessence of its own emptiness; the only image we had of the void was our own poor universe. All the void we would ever know was there, in the relativity of what is, for even the void had been no more than a relative void,a void secretly shot with veins and temptations to be something, given that in a moment of crisis at its own nothingness it had been able to give rise to the universe.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“Now here's the good part. It was the part where Monica told me was the reason her life had seemed to collapse. It was to give her what she needed so she'd didn't feel incomplete and unfulfilled anymore.”
― Mira Kirshenbaum, Everything Happens for a Reason: Finding the True Meaning of the Events in Our Lives

“Love equals loss, loss equals you feeling incomplete for life.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“When you find someone who completes your incompleteness then never let them go.”
― Avijeet Das

“Since Gothic days all great art, with the exception of a few short-lived classicist movements, has something fragmentary about it, an inward or outward incompleteness, an unwillingness, whether conscious or unconscious, to utter the last word. There is always something left over for the spectator or reader to complete. The modern artist shrinks from the last word, because he feels the inadequacy of all words— a feeling which we may say was never experienced by man before Gothic times.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages

“Perception is all about incomplete knowledge.
It may turn positive if wisdom overpowers knowledge, and it may turn negative if incompleteness overshadows wisdom.”
― Mahendar Singh Jakhar

“Gödel (and indeed the whole mathematical community) failed to realise that all valid mathematical axioms must be tautological, i.e. must be shown to have a common root, of which they are equivalent
expressions. Any mathematical axioms that are not tautologous automatically fall foul of Cartesian substance dualism, i.e. they imply different ontologies and epistemologies – different and incompatible
versions of mathematics – hence cannot be complete and consistent with regard to each other. In other words, Gödel simply came up with an ingenious way of showing that existence must be predicated on monism, and not on dualism or pluralism.”
― Mike Hockney, Gödel Versus Wittgenstein

“Ele nunca tinha entendido como pode essas pessoas que são alegres e tristes, como humoristas às vezes sã, como palhaços de circo. Nunca soube como isso funcionava até conhecê-la.
Observando-a, Lucas entende que pessoas alegres e tristes são como Carol. Elas sabem ser felizes, mas vivem sem pedaço. Sabem sorrir, mas nunca deixam de ser incompletas.
Mas, principalmente, não sabem, ou não conseguem deixar preencher.”
― Raabe Gabriel, Lucas & Carol

“To create is to confess the void we cannot fill with words.”
― Monika Ajay Kaul