Quotes About Mystery

Peter Levenda

the Orphic Egg. Orphism was the mystery religion that gave rise to the Dionysian mysteries.

THAT NO ONE knows what happened to Jesus's foreskin is particularly interesting because there used to be upwards of a dozen in circulation.

When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.

Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.

This world is painted on a wild dark metal

In the jungle, during one night in each month, the moths did not come to the lanterns; through the black reaches of the outer night, so it was said, they flew toward the full moon.

Time was wiggy in so much dark.

Rules? You don't even know what game we're playing, mister.

I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars." –Jorge Luis Borges

Translation is like love; I do not know what it is but I think I know what it is not.

By employing classical concepts of idealized beauty and changes in perspective, icons speak to us of reality transformed and transfigured, both in and through God's presence. They speak of transcendence and mystery. As iconographers, we point to a reality that we have never seen with our own eyes. In fact, all our images of God, heaven, the angels, and the saints, whether in poetry, prose, ritual, music, or icons, represent our limited attempts to speak of the unspeakable.

There is something sweetly inexplicable that passes between two people who are destined to meet when one day, after wandering often aimlessly through life, searching without ever knowing for exactly what, the heavens finally fall into alignment and they happen upon one another unexpectedly, as if by magic.

The mystery religions were instituted in order to protect the marvels of the commonplace from those who would devalue them.

The night itself wanted to touch her

M got into difficulties. Somebody – and since the client was dead it wasn't clear who – didn't like his two paintings.

The victim was white, in his early thirties, five feet eleven inches tall, ten and a half stone in weight, and in good physical condition. The last part always irritated Banks: how could a corpse ever be in good physical condition ?

I have just finished "All the Colors of Darkness" 090209

And now he was dead. She didn't know how, or what had killed him, just that his body had ceased to exist.

Forget forgetting. We seek to forget ourselves, to be surprised and to do something without knowing how or why. The way of life is wonderful. It is by abandonment.

One Sometimes you're walking through the woods when a stick leaps into the air and strikes you across the back and shoulders several times, then flies away lost in the underbrush.

he has bills of money folded thick in his hand. He gives me some. "Go in and buy a ticket to Bend," he says. "One way." "Where?" I say. "I've never heard of that place." "Bend,

The mystery of the MAGIC BATHROOM will be revealed unto thee.

The incoming of God as expressed in the incarnation represents a beautiful expression of this simultaneous revealing and withdrawal, for in the Incarnation the mystery of God is not dissipated but rather deepened. The mystery is not unmasked, but rather dwells with us, in our midst. The mystery is thus not overcome in the Incarnation but rather encountered there.