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Mystery

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The Mystery of mysteries is the Door of all essence. ~ Laozi

Mystery is something unexplainable or unknown.

See also:
Secrets

Quotes

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I want to hear you laugh.
Don't let the mystery go now. ~ Kate Bush
A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. ~ Winston Churchill
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. ~ Albert Einstein
I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer. ~ Ken Kesey
Homage to you, O ye divine Lords of things, ye holy beings, whose seats are veiled! Homage to you, O ye Lords of Eternity, whose forms are concealed, whose sanctuaries are mysteries, whose places of abode are not known! ~ Book of the Dead
  • Man has always been afraid of anything mysterious, forgetting that the key to the mystery is within himself. One must free oneself from all impeding conditions or circumstances, which are different for everyone. Progress depends upon free will that is directed toward good.
  • I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.
    • Jorge Luis Borges, "Unworthy", In Praise of Darkness (1969), tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998).
  • Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.
    • Ray Bradbury, in "All flesh is one: what matter scores?" in When Elephants Last In The Dooryard Bloomed : Celebrations For Almost Any Day In The Year (1975).
  • I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”
  • Everybody is wonderin' what and where they all came from.
    Everybody is worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done.
    But no one knows for certain 'n' so it's all the same to me.
    I think I'll just let the mystery be.
  • The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
    • Albert Einstein in Mein Weltbild (1931), as quoted in Introduction to Philosophy (1935) by George Thomas White Patrick and Frank Miller Chapman, p. 44.
  • It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.
    • Albert Einstein in Mein Weltbild (1931), as quoted in Introduction to Philosophy (1935) by George Thomas White Patrick and Frank Miller Chapman, p. 44.
  • Reason quite properly rejects contradiction, but rationalism abhors mystery, which every heresy attempts in its own way to resolve.
  • The angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: but in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants the prophets.
  • I'm for mystery, not interpretive answers. … The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
    • Ken Kesey in "The Art of Fiction" - interview by Robert Faggen, The Paris Review No. 130 (Spring 1994), p. 92.
  • We met in secret : mystery is to love
    Like perfume to the flower ; the maiden's blush
    Looks loveliest when her cheek is pale with fear.
    • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The London Literary Gazette (18th May 1822), Poetic Sketches. Second Series - Sketch the Third Rosalie
  • Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
    Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
    These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
    this appears as darkness.
    Darkness within darkness.
    The gate to all mystery.
  • Tao can be talked about, but not the Eternal Tao.
    Names can be named, but not the Eternal Name.
    As the origin of heaven-and-earth, it is nameless:
    As "the Mother" of all things, it is nameable.
    So, as ever hidden, we should look at its inner aspects.
    As always manifest, we should look at its outer aspects.
    These two flow from the same source,
    though differently named;
    And both are called mysteries.
    The Mystery of mysteries is the Door of all essence.
  • Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
    Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
    Yet mystery and manifestations
    arise from the same source.
    This source is called darkness.
    Darkness within darkness.
    The gateway to all understanding.
  • Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery.
    By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.
    Yet mystery and reality
    emerge from the same source.
    This source is called darkness.
    Darkness born from darkness.
    The beginning of all understanding.
  • The unwanting soul
    sees what's hidden,
    and the ever-wanting soul
    sees only what it wants.
    Two things, one origin,
    but different in name,
    whose identity is mystery.
    Mystery of all mysteries!
    The door to the hidden.
  • Sex and death have in common the fact that they are the two biological aspects of the mysterium tremendum. Mystery—defined here as a situation in which the data impinge on the problem—has its ultimate meaning in these two human experiences.
    • Rollo May, Love and Will (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1969), Ch. 4: "Love and Death", Death and the Obsession with Sex (last paragraph)
  • Some things must needs gain in mystery before we can at all undertake to think upon them. Without mystery they are all obscure. Who can think, for instance, of the infinity of space without adding inconceivable things to his meditation?
    • Alice Meynell, "A Hundred Years Ago", in The Second Person Singular and Other Essays (Oxford University Press, 1921), p. 69
  • The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.
    • Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), p. 57
  • A mystery is only a mystery for a time, for it relies upon a sense of wonder and curiosity to maintain its air, and that needs energy. If it is not revealed before the energy runs out, then the mystery becomes a conundrum, a problem, an annoyance, and a pestilence.
  • Tao mystics never talk about God, reincarnation, heaven, hell. No, they don't talk about these things. These are all creations of human mind: explanations for something which can never be explained, explanations for the mystery. In fact, all explanations are against God because explanation de-mystifies existence. Existence is a mystery, and one should accept it as a mystery and not pretend to have any explanation. No, explanation is not needed – only exclamation, a wondering heart, awakened, surprised, feeling the mystery of life each moment. Then, and only then, you know what truth is. And truth liberates.
  • Homage to you, O ye divine Lords of things, ye holy beings, whose seats are veiled! Homage to you, O ye Lords of Eternity, whose forms are concealed, whose sanctuaries are mysteries, whose places of abode are not known!
  • Ride, captain ride, upon your mystery ship,
    Be amazed, at the friends, you have here on your trip.
    Ride, captain ride, upon your mystery ship,
    On your way, to a world, that others might have missed.
  • "Can you think of any reason why someone would kill him?"
    The troll scratched his head. "Well, 'cos dey wanted him dead, I reckon. Dat's a good reason."
  • "Luke, this reminds me of a puzzle"
    • The Professor Layton Series
  • "A true gentleman leaves no puzzle unsolved"
    • Professor Layton and the Curious Village (2007)
  • Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance.
    • Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (1921), Lecture I: Recent Criticisms of "Consciousness".
  • Just as nature abhors a vacuum, our minds abhor a mystery."
    • Irena Sertôrian in The Infinite Future by Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie
  • A prohibition and a mystery are the same—a locked room whose inscrutable door beckons us closer. Human curiosity impels us to open it, and the enlightenment we find inside—if it's truly worth our while—will invariably devastate us.
    • Irena Sertôrian in The Infinite Future by Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie
  • But the divine mystery is inherent in the divine, a part of the nature of God, and can never disappear. And this means that it is still a mystery even to the mystic who has directly experienced it, nay, even to God Himself. That is why it is ineffable. The mystery and the ineffability of God are one and the same thing.
  • Between the mysteries of death and life
    Thou standest, loving, guiding,— not explaining;
    We ask, and Thou art silent,— yet we gaze,
    And our charmed hearts forget their drear complaining;
    No crushing fate, no stony destiny!
    Thou Lamb that hast been slain, we rest in Thee.
    • Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Life's Mystery", reported in Charlotte Fiske Rogé, The Cambridge Book of Poetry and Song (1832), p. 544.
  • 微乎微乎，至於無形；神乎神乎，至於無聲；故能為敵之司命。
    • Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate.
    • Alternative translation: Subtle and insubstantial, the expert leaves no trace; divinely mysterious, he is inaudible. Thus he is master of his enemy's fate.'
    • Alternative translation: O divine art of subtlety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible and hence we can hold the enemy's fate in our hands.
  • There is no mystery whatever — only inability to perceive the obvious.
    • Wei Wu Wei, All Else Is Bondage : Non-Volitional Living (1964)

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

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Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).
  • Whoever believes in a God at all, believes in an infinite mystery; and if the existence of God is such an infinite mystery, we can very well expect and afford to have many of His ways mysterious to us.
    • Ichabod Spencer, p. 421.
  • Where is the subject that does not branch out into infinity? For every grain of sand is a mystery; so is every daisy in summer, and so is every snow-flake in winter. Both upwards and downwards, and all around us, science and speculation pass into mystery at last.
  • Augustine, the father of [[theologians], was walking on the ocean shore and pondering over the truth, "three distinct persons, not separate, but distinct; and yet but one God;" and he came upon a little boy that was playing with a colored sea-shell, scooping a hole in the sand, and then going down to the waves and getting his shell full of water and putting it into the hole. Augustine said, "What are you doing, my little fellow? " The boy replied, "I am going to pour the [sea]] into that hole." "Ah," said Augustine, "that is what I have been attempting. Standing at the ocean of infinity, I have attempted to grasp it with my finite mind."
  • Were there no mysteries in the Bible, we should doubt its being the transcript of the Eternal Mind. The "mystery of godliness" adapts it to our ruined race. Those mysteries of the Bible are like the mountains of the world; they give grandeur to the landscape and fertility to the soil.
  • The mysteries of the Bible should teach us, at one and the same time, our nothingness and our greatness; producing humility, and animating hope. I bow before these mysteries. I knew that I should find them, and I pretend not to remove them. But whilst I thus prostrate myself, it is with deep gladness and exultation of spirit. God would not have hinted the mystery, had He not hereafter designed to explain it. And, therefore, are my thoughts on a far-off home, and rich things are around me, and the voices of many harpers, and the shinings of bright constellations, and the clusters of the cherub and the seraph; and a whisper, which seems not of this earth, is circulating through the soul, " Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known."
  • The Bible tells me explicitly that Christ was God; and it tells me, as explicitly that Christ was man. It does not go on to state the modus or manner of the union. I stop, therefore, where the Bible stops. I bow before a God-man as my Mediator, but I own as inscrutable the mysteries of His person.
  • In viewing the scheme of redemption, I seem like one viewing a vast and complicated machine of exquisite contrivance; what I comprehend of it is wonderful, what I do not, is, perhaps, more so still.
  • That great chain of causes, which, linking one to another, even to the throne of God Himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours.
  • We know, and we feel, that the vast business of our redemption, arranged in the councils of the far-back eternity, and acted out amid the wonderings and throbbings of the universe, could not have been that stupendous transaction which gave God glory by giving sinners safety, if the inspired account brought its dimensions within the compass of a human arithmetic, or denned its issues by the lines of a human demarcation.
  • The nature of Christ is, I grant it, from one end to another, a web of mysteries; but this mysteriousness does not correspond to the difficulties which all existence contains. Let it be rejected, and the whole world is an enigma; let it be accepted, and we possess a wonderful explanation of the history of man.
  • Can any thing be more mysterious than the union of soul and body, unless it be the still greater mystery, which some have professed to believe, that matter can be so organized as to produce the amazing intellectual results which we witness in man? In believing our own existence we believe a mystery as great as any that the Christian religion presents.
  • At some turning point of your life, when some great joy flashed, or some great shadow darkened upon you all at once; when some crisis that wanted an instantaneous decision appeared,— why, what regions of thought, purpose, plan, resolution, what wildernesses of desolate sorrow, and what paradises of blooming gladness, your soul has gone through in a moment.
  • We live in the midst of infinite existence; and widely as we can see, and vastly as we have discovered, we have but crossed the threshold, we have but entered the vestibule of the Creator's temple. In this temple there is an everlasting worship of life, an anthem of many choruses, a hymn of incense that goes up forever.
  • We are children shut up as yet in the narrow hollow of our native valley, with all the universe, outside the closely engirdling hills, for a great wonderland, of which we dream childish dreams, as the light of morning or evening kindles from beyond. "Laws of Nature" — what dost thou know of them, O man? Look out on the great miracles of nature, blooming in flowers and stars, away to the gates of the city of God, what dost thou know of its laws and wonders?
    • John Cunningham Geikie, p. 424.
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