Quotes About Mystery

I'll bare the basics, bridle the beast Unreason, and wrest from murky mystery the pearl of sweetest sense.

She had very lovely hair. Blue eyes, too, and tons of vanity to keep everything in her favorite perspective. At times she seemed to behave quite stupidly, but then at other times I have wondered.

It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but. instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance' is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will re- main so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.

Il me vient alors cette exaltation d'aimer à fond quelqu'un d'inconnu, et qui le reste à jamais: mouvement mystique: j'accède à la connaissance de l'inconnaissance.

To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion. To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god; I shall never manage to solve the question the other asks me, the lover is not Oedipus. Then all that is left for me to do is to reverse my ignorance into truth.

I was looking at everything in the other's face, the other's body, coldly : lashes, toenail, thin eyebrows, thin lips, the luster of the eyes, a mole, a way of holding a cigarette; I was fascinated-fascination being, after all, only the extreme of detachment-by a kind of colored ceramicized, vitrified figurine in which I could read, without understanding anything about it, the cause of my desire. )

Aussi, le style est-il toujours un secret[...]

I am caught in this contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge to the other ( I know you—I'm the only one who really knows you!); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other's origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.

What is a hero? The one who has the last word. Can we think of a hero who does not speak before dying?

Magic consultations, secret rites, and votive actions are not absent from the amorous subject's life, whatever culture he belongs to.

THE TABLECLOTH OF TURIN

How this seemingly dull, phlegmatic man, in a stupendous act of nation building, presided over the victorious Continental Army and forged the office of the presidency is a mystery to most Americans. Something essential about Washington has been lost to posterity, making him seem a worthy but plodding man who somehow stumbled into greatness.

having warned the children not to mention the nose

that the retaliation would also be highly personal. That Hamilton could be so sensitive to criticisms of himself and so insensitive to the effect his words had on others was a central mystery of his psyche.

Confidentially I prefer not to have it known where I am.

I do not wish to have it known now or at any time.

there will never be another bank as powerful, mysterious, or opulent as the old House of Morgan.

think she was also thinking, perhaps, of Justine, up there in the big house among the tall candles and the oil-paintings by forgotten masters.

like insects on a rubber sheet, we live in a universe whose true form is hidden from direct view.

Particle physicists are way ahead of cosmologists. Cosmology has produced one totally mysterious quantity: the energy of empty space, about which we understand virtually nothing. However, particle physics has not understood many more quantities for far longer!

For most people, the central questions of existence ultimately come down to transcendental ones: Why is there a universe at all? Why are we here? Whatever presumptions one might bring to the question Why?, if we understand the how better, why will come into sharper focus.

The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place? —LOUISE BOGAN, Journey Around My Room

The Higgs is like a toilet. It hides all the messy details

El universo no es solamente más raro de lo que suponemos, sino más raro de lo que podemos suponer.   J. B. S. HALDANE, 1924