Quotes About Mystery

There is not, beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.

Every profound spirit needs a mask

Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

There is a point in every philosophy at which the conviction of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery: adventavit asinus, / pulcher et fortissimus. (Translation: The ass arrives, beautiful and most brave.)

Wohl bin ich ein Wald und eine Nacht dunkler Bäume: doch wer sich vor meinem Dunkel nicht scheut, der findet auch Rosenhänge unter meinen Zypressen.

whatever is profound loves masks; what is most profound even hates image and parable.

But a spirit who is sure of himself speaks softly; he seeks secrecy, he lets himself be awaited.

The labyrinthine man never seeks the truth but always and only his Ariadne.

And even in woman's conscious love, there is still always surprise and lightning and night, along with the light.

The obscurities in my soul terrify galaxies.

To sacrifice God for nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising generation; we all know something thereof already.

The sea storms: all is in the sea.

It was odd how old buildings had secret spaces in them that weren't really hidden but were never noticed;

The Mouser grinned as he poked about with his gaze at the nastily slimed cobbles and the dead bodies and the scattered hardware. "Cat's Claw must be here somewhere," he muttered, "and I did hear the chink of gold.…" "You'd feel a penny under the tongue of a man you were strangling!" Fafhrd told him angrily.

Lankhmar City would feed me, aye, feed me well—and be paid only with lumps and perhaps a deep scratch or two. So to Lankhmar I went. Falling in there with a clever girl of the same turn of mind and some experience, I did well for two full rounds of moons and a few more. We worked only in black garb, and called ourselves to ourselves the Dark Duo.

Then the hut was moving inland too on its five spindly legs. It turned around, so that its door faced away from them, and its speed increased, its legs moving nimbly as those of a cockroach, and was soon lost amongst the tangle of thorn and seahawk trees. So ended the first encounter of the Mouser and his comrade Fafhrd with Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.

And then he says that Thibaut always referred to Twin Peaks as Cleopatra's Breasts.

Know it or not, man treads between twin abysses a tightrope that has neither beginning nor end.

more than once he saw the four equations expressing Einstein's generalized theory of gravitation: He never connected them with the little girl's chant: "Gik-lo, I-o, Rik-o, Gis-so.

This has happened to people. There was Ambrose Bierce, who walked out of America and existence, and there are thousands of others who have disappeared without a trace, though many of these may not have been caught up by time tornadoes and I do not know if a time gale blew across the deck of the Marie Celeste.

The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far, far beyond the mad, beat, half-hyserical laughter...the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever. A Bit of the Dark World

Lord, what romantical fools men were, to overpass the known and good in order to strain and stretch after the mysterious merely unknown. Were dreams simply better than reality? Had fancy always more style?

Love is the key to the mystery. Love by its very nature is not selfish, but generous. It seeks not its own, but the good of others. The measure of love is not the pleasure it gives-that is the way the world judges it-but the joy and peace it can purchase for others.

Learning comes from books; penetration of a mystery from suffering.