quotations about mystery
Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?
CHARLES DE LINT
"Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night", The Ivory and the Horn
There is no mystery whatever -- only inability to perceive the obvious.
WEI WU WEI
All Else Is Bondage: Non-Volitional Living
Mysteries are irritated by facts.
NORMAN MAILER
Superman Comes to the Supermarket
Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
attributed, Only Mystery: Federico García Lorca's Poetry in Word and Image
Every solution to every problem is simple. It's the distance between the two where the mystery lies.
DEREK LANDY
Skulduggery Pleasant
The mysterious is the very ground of our being--our hope and our destiny. No one ever knows the simplest thing unless one also feels there is more that has not been explained.
RICHARD S. GILBERT
In the Middle of a Journey
We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what we see and do every day.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Some mysteries are too pleasing to be questioned.
JAMES ALAN GARDNER
Ascending
The mysteries are not easily available. You have to earn entrance into them.
NORMAN MAILER
Rolling Stone, May 3, 2007
The mysteries are expressions of God's grace -- God's work -- through earthly and material things to bring earthly and material things, specifically human beings, into alignment with the spiritual, heavenly, and transcendent order. The mysteries are only secondarily about the individual recipients, and it is hubris to put concern with human recipients first. The mysteries are about God's longing and desire for his creation and his creatures to be restored to his original plan.
NATALIE B. VAN KIRK
"Christ Present in the Moment", Canonical Theism: A Proposal for Theology and the Church
Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity.
JEAN COCTEAU
The Infernal Machine
I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith.
R. A. SALVATORE
Streams of Silver
For philosophy is a predominant mode of query, if not its purest spirit. And ultimate mysteries are antithetical to query.
STEPHEN DAVID ROSS
Philosophical Mysteries
The mysterious eludes all words of explanation, but it is more significant than all that can be explained. There is always something beyond where we have gone.
RICHARD S. GILBERT
In the Middle of a Journey
Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.
CARL SAGAN
Cosmos
Mysteries are tied to our questioning, a product of our persistence in asking "why." Thus, mystery is tied to "wondering about" something and not merely the awe from "wondering at" something.
RICHARD H. JONES
Curing the Philosopher's Disease: Reinstating Mystery in the Heart of Philosophy
A field of an experience provides an interesting and rich image, one that has some of the quality of the mysterious, for the mysterious is something that enters our experience but without revealing its full nature.
R. BRUCE ELDER
Image and Identity
Mystery is the basic appeal of magic. Once the secrets are known, the magician becomes a mere manipulator, an actor in a suspense drama which has little impact because the audience knows the ending in advance.
MILBOURNE CHRISTOPHER
Magic: A Picture History
Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"Recent Criticisms of Consciousness,", The Analysis of Mind