Quotes About Inscrutability

In the absence of conviction, I've come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life. An abundance of mystery is simply part of the bargain—which doesn't strike me as something to lament. Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief.

It's very hard to know what wisdom is.

As if nothing had happened.' 'Well. Nobody knows.

What is divine? It is simply that which man has not been able to understand. Once you do, it loses its divinity.

Woman is the unfathomable, incalculable mystery, the problem we men can never hope to solve.

Julia Bradshaw was part Cherokee Indian. She was small and dark and the inscrutability of her eyes hinted at enigmas a man might unravel would he take the time to try. Bloodworth was to learn that it is the nature of an enigma to remain unsolved, and that inscrutability means just what it says.

Magic isn't easily identified

That room was Rolandsen's world. Rolandsen was not just irresponsibility and inebriation, he was also great thinker and inventor. There was a smell of acids that permeated the corridor and came to the notice of every visitor. Rolandsen made no secret of the fact that he had all these medicaments there solely to disguise the aroma of all the brandy he consumed. But this was part of an act designed purely to give himself an air of inscrutability.

Be like a slippery ball that cannot be held: Let no one know what gets to you, or where your weaknesses like.

The human heart is an abyss that is impossible to predict; the most piercing looks cannot gauge it.'41

Nothing important is completely explicable.

What did he know about her, anyway? She was unfathomable. The simple fact that she countenanced Coke Rymer at all was unfathomable. All her motives were buried under the ocean.

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

Even guppies have their opacities.

My dear fellow, I don't think you've the gift of seeing very far. The truth is they don't know what to make of me; — and I don't intend that they shall. I'm playing my game, and there isn't one of 'em understands it except myself. It's no good my sitting here, you know. I shan't be able to move. How am I to get at you if I want anything?

Girls have a tendency to take responsibility for romantic misinterpretations, when often it's men whose perfectly honed emotional inscrutability makes life more complicated than it should be.

Don't waste your time trying to get into my head. There's nothing there.

Beneath the skin of everything is something nobody can know.

Sometimes I feel it's his personal game, that he's in some sort of undeclared contest for impenetrability.

It's good to be difficult to know. Too many people are too easy to know.

had stood there silently, watching, without interest or purpose, like a chemical compound on a photographic plate, absorbing visual shapes because they were there to be absorbed, but unable ever to form any estimate of the objects of her vision.

McKinley was known above all for his inscrutability. He gave almost all the people he met the impression that he agreed with them, and rarely allowed even his closest advisers to know what he was thinking.

You're not as cold as you pretend to be,' she said. 'I think your doors open in different places, that's all. Most people just don't know how to get in to you. They knock and they knock where the door is supposed to be, but it's a blank wall. But you're there. I've watched you. I've seen you do some awfully cold things warmly and some warm things coldly. Or does that make sense?

She could find no purchase on the older woman's marble-smooth countenance. There were no cracks to give her a view into her soul.