Quotes About Mystery

As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: "In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.)

Das Fazit aus alledem lautet: Wir leben in einem Universum, dessen Alter wir nicht berechnen können, umgeben von Sternen, deren Entfernung wir nicht kennen, zwischen Materie, die wir nicht identifizieren können, und alles funktioniert nach physikalischen Gesetzen, deren Eigenschaften wir eigentlich nicht verstehen.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand.

Travel is like love, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end." All love affairs, all long-term relationships—travel included—demand that we keep an element of mystery alive and kicking.

The next time you spray on Chanel No. 5 (assuming you do), you may wish to reflect that you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster.

Water is strange stuff. It is formless and transparent, and yet we long to be beside it. It has no taste and yet we love the taste of it. We will travel great distances and pay small fortunes to see it in sunshine. And even though we know it is dangerous and drowns tens of thousands of people every year, we can't wait to frolic in it.

We don't know if he ever left England. We don't know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was.

The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can't adequately imagine

Trinil skullcap.

Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics. Everyone

In his secretiveness he didn't merely resemble Newton, but actively exceeded him.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand.

Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics.

It was all a long time ago and at this stage we just don't know.

J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.

You have at least 200,000 different types of protein laboring away inside you, and so far we understand what no more than about 2 percent of them do.

In short, there is just a great deal we don't know.

According to the new theory, an electron moving between orbits would disappear from one and reappear instantaneously in another without visiting the space between

All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0.

the strange behavior of the electron. The principal problem they faced was that the electron sometimes behaved like a particle and sometimes like a wave.

So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.

At all events, rather less is known about Lucy than is generally supposed. It isn't even actually known that she was a female.

Right up to the closing years of the eighteenth century... scientists everywhere searched for, and sometimes believed they had actually found, things that just weren't there: vitiated airs, dephlogisticated marine acids, phloxes, calxes, terraqueous exhalations and, above all, phlogiston, the substance that was thought to be the active agent in combustion. Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious élan vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life.