Quotes About Mystery

We shall pick up an existence by its frogs.

The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property.

It's like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that never was—

When, upon the closed system of normal preoccupations, a story of a sea serpent appears, it is inhospitably treated. To us of the wider cordialities, it has recommendations for kinder reception. I think that we shall be noted in recognitions of good works for our bizarre charities.

I fear me, I fear me: this is one of the profoundly damned. I blurt out something that should, perhaps, be withheld for several hundred pages—but that damned thing was the size of an elephant.

Very few have any conception of the degree to which gypsies have been the colporteurs of what in Italy is called "the old faith," or witchcraft.

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.

Life is a little plot of light. We enter, clasp a hand or two, and go our several ways back into the darkness. The mystery is infinitely pathetic and picturesque.

[T]hat blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.

Reason has moons, but moons not hers Lie mirror'd on the sea, Confounding her astronomers, But, O! delighting me.

Warren Norvin Winslow, 1949

God delights in odd numbers.

You lie dead and cold— Unsuspecting. Who could fathom what you hold?— Bones of poets, castles, carved marble— A doll's head. You lie dead and cold— Unsuspecting.

The veil concealing truth gets windswept in the wee hours, revealing all to the silence of the night.

There are worlds in an opal.

PHILOSOPHY, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

One might as well try to photograph air as to say why one loves.

Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese. Except Virgil and the anonymous rhymer of "If all the trees were bread and cheese," I can recall no verse about cheese. Yet it has every quality which we require in exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word, and it rhymes to "breeze" and "seas." Cheese has also variety, the very soul of song.

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes or rhythms, 'Yes, this is it. This is why the poem moves me so...' But you're back again where you began. You've back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.

If it is a wild tune, it is a poem... Theme alone can steady us down. Just as the first mystery was how a poem could have a tune in such a straightness as meter, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled. It should be of the pleasure of the poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love.

"That's what." —She

The obscurest sayings of the truly great are often those which contain the germ of the profoundest and most useful truths. Genius rapidly traverses the living present to bury itself in the deepest mysteries of the universe; often making the grandest discoveries at a single glance.

Fog is rain that whispers.