Omniscience mainly in religion, is the capacity to know everything that there is to know. In particular, Hinduism, Jainism and the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) believe that there is a divine being who is omniscient. An omniscient point-of-view, in writing, is to know everything that can be known about a character, including past history, thoughts, feelings, etc. In Latin, 'omnis' means "all" and 'sciens' means "knowing".

CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

Quotes

Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F

  • His views, policy and purposes were sometimes even more astounding than his curious gaps or lapses of omniscience. On the whole, the relation was the queerest that Henry Adams ever kept up.
  • What mystifies me is how he or any one else can determine what is a desirable type of industry such as should qualify for special assistance of this kind. In my own simple way I should have thought that a desirable industry was, almost by definition, one which could establish itself and thrive without special assistance in ordinary market conditions. Anything else suggests a degree of omniscience which I, at least, am not prepared to credit even the most expert with. I trust the commercial judgment only of those who are themselves taking the risks.
  • Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires - or forbidden to him - he attributed to these gods. One may say, therefore, that these gods were the ideals of his culture. Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself. But only, it is true, in the way that ideals are usually realized in the general experience of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others only by halves. Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so to speak, quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him and they still give him trouble at times.

G - L

  • Total freedom from change would imply total freedom from error; but this is the prerogative of Omniscience alone. The world, however, is very censorious, and will hardly give a man credit for simplicity and singleness of heart, who is not only in the habit of changing his opinions, but also of bettering his fortunes by every change.

M - R

  • The philosophers have uttered very perverse ideas as regards God's Omniscience of everything beside Himself; they have stumbled in such a manner that they cannot rise again, nor can those who adopt their views.

S - Z

  • According to the belief of the Jains, only the omniscient are able to give a right code of rules of life. These teachers or Tirthankaras are not creators or rulers of the world. They are pure divine souls, who have attained perfection. They never again take human birth.
  • And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way, Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle--all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe--for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient."
  • Omniscience, the foremost attribute of a liberated jiva, is the emblem of its purity; thus, a liberated soul, such as a Tirthankara, is called a kevalin (“possessor of omniscience”). However, not all kevalins are Tirthankaras: becoming a Tirthankara requires the development of a particular type of karmic destiny.
    • G. Ralph Strohl in: Karma, Encyclopedia Britannica, 23 March 2014.
  • No End of Fun
    So he got to have happiness,
    he's got to have truth, too,
    he's got to have eternity
    did you ever!
    He has only just learned to tell dreams from waking;
    only just realized that he is he;
    only just whittled with his hand né fin
    a flint, a rocket ship;
    easily drowned in the ocean's teaspoon,
    not even funny enough to tickle the void;
    sees only with his eyes;
    hears only with his ears;
    his speech's personal best is the conditional;
    he uses his reason to pick holes in reason.
    In short, he's next to no one,
    but his head's full of freedom, omniscience, and the Being.
    beyond his foolish meat—
    did you ever!
  • To say that God is omniscient is to say that He possesses perfect knowledge and therefore has no need to learn. But it is more: it is to say that God has never learned and cannot learn.

See also

This article is issued from Wikiquote. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.