Selected mystery quotes

1. Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored.

2. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.

3. There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

4. The last fact which knowledge can discover is that the world is a manifestation, and in every way a puzzling manifestation, of the universal will to live.

5. Profound love demands a deep conception and out of this develops reverence for the mystery of life. It brings us close to all beings, to the poorest and smallest as well as all others.

6. Look, it's one of the great mysteries of the world, I cannot answer that question. I think I'm vaguely blonde. To be perfectly frank, I don't know.

7. I love you, what star do you live on?

8. Gather a shell from the strewn beach And listen at its lips: they sigh The same desire and mystery, The echo of the whole sea's speech.

9. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

10. The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

11. How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

12. America was still a land of wonder. The ancient spell still hung unbroken over the wild, vast world of mystery beyond the sea,-a land of romance, adventure, and gold.

13. There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.

14. There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.

15. There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.

16. Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

17. Dear, beauteous death, the jewel of the just! Shining nowhere but in the dark; What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust, Could man outlook that mark!

18. A good many things go around in the dark besides Santa Claus.

19. Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.

20. Though I was satisfied that I was on the verge of perhaps a magnificent find, probably one of the missing tombs that I had been seeking for many years, I was much puzzled by the smallness of the opening in comparison with those of other royal tombs in the valley.

21. If we knew the meaning to everything that is happening to us, then there would be no meaning.

22. I know for a fact that this idea of the Jews causing the war and the Jews being so all important is nonsense. But that was Hitler's idea, and...was pure fantasy. As I say, Hitler is a riddle to me and will always remain so.

23. My inspirations don't come from outer space, they just come to me. I have no idea why they come when they do.

24. Every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.

25. The infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable; not concealed, but incomprehensible; it is a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure unsearchable sea.

26. I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

27. There is many a rich stone laid up in the bowels of the earth, many a fair pearl laid up in the bosom of the sea, that never was seen, nor never shall be.

28. It is easy to understand God as long as you don't try to explain him.

29. Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.

30. In other words, all of my books are lies. They are simply maps of a territory, shadows of a reality, gray symbols dragging their bellies across the dead page, suffocated signs full of muffled sound and faded glory, signifying absolutely nothing. And it is the nothing, the Mystery, the Emptiness alone that needs to be realized: not known but felt, not thought but breathed, not an object but an atmosphere, not a lesson but a life.

31. The universe has its secrets. Extra dimensions of space might be one of them. If so, the universe has been hiding those dimensions, protecting them, keeping them coyly under wraps. From a casual glance, you would never suspect a thing.

32. Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.

33. I surrender myself to everything. I love, I feel pain, I struggle. The world seems to me wider than the mind, my heart a dark and almighty mystery.

34. A woman's body is a dark and monstrous mystery; between her supple thighs a heavy whirlpool swirls, two rivers crash, and woe to him who slips and falls!

35. My eyes close and uncomprehendingly see the dream in the infinite space that stretches away, elusive, before me.

36. The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us; visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower; Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening, Like clouds in starlight widely spread, Like memory of music fled, Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

37. Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it.

38. The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music... The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words.

39. There is a point where in the mystery of existence contradictions meet; where movement is not all movement and stillness is not all stillness; where the idea and the form, the within and the without, are united; where infinite becomes finite, yet not losing its infinity. If this meeting is dissolved, then things become unreal.

40. A sight to dream of, not to tell!

41. There are things known and there are things unknown and in between are the Doors. [this is a quote from William Blake]

42. A spirit that permeates the universe, the essence of truth, nature, being, life, indescribable concepts which are trivialized when expressed in words. (defining God)

43. 'As soon as you start talking about mystique, you have none.' -- Interview for Rolling Stone magazine.

44. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war!

45. 'In the end, we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke. The soul is its punchline.'

46. That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such - be it so; but I love, and how could I feel love if I did not live, and if others did not live, and then, if we live, there is something mysterious in that. Now call that God, or human nature or whatever you like, but there is something which I cannot define systematically, though it is very much alive and very real, and see, that is God, or as good as God. To believe in God for me is to feel that there is a God, not a dead one, or a stuffed one, but a living one, who with irresistible force urges us toward aimer encore; that is my opinion.

47. In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire?

48. Other than He cannot be qualified by two (opposite) qualities at one time; yet With Him they do not create opposition. He is hidden in His manifestation, manifest in His concealing.

49. There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret. No sooner had I crawled beneath the overhanging foliage of the palm, than there dropped from its branches a young child of such beauty as I never beheld before. Though ragged and dusty, this being bore the features of a faun or demigod, and seemed almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadow of the tree. It smiled and extended its hand, but before I could arise and speak I heard in the upper air the exquisite melody of singing; notes high and low blent with a sublime and ethereal harmoniousness. The sun had by this time sunk below the horizon, and in the twilight I saw an aureole of lambent light encircled the child's head. Then in a tone of silver it addressed me: 'It is the end. They have come down through the gloaming from the stars. Now all is over, and beyond the Arinurian streams we shall dwell blissfully in Teloe.' As the child spoke, I beheld a soft radiance through the leaves of the palm tree, and rising, greeted a pair whom I knew to be the chief singers among those I had heard. A god and goddess they must have been, for such beauty is not mortal; and they took my hands, saying, 'Come, child, you have heard the voices, and all is well....'

50. * The smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps- does anybody know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumor that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning. ~ 61

51. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.

52. I've looked at clouds from both sides now, From up and down, and still somehow It's cloud illusions I recall, I really don't know clouds at all.

53. I've looked at love from both sides now From give and take, and still somehow, It's love's illusions I recall I really don't know love at all.

54. But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced:

55. Let go into the mystery Let yourself go You've got to open up your heart That's all I know Trust what I say and do what you're told Baby, and all your dirt will turn Into gold.

56. O Blithe newcomer! I have heard, I hear thee and rejoice. O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird, Or but a wandering Voice?

57. I shall from time to time write a small Clue - so that you may be the more thoroughly confounded.

58. Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But I do not doubt that the lion belongs to it even though he cannot at once reveal himself because of his enormous size.

59. I have discovered motives, my own and everyone else's, to be impenetrable.

60. A second voice was at mine ear, A little whisper silver-clear, A murmur, 'Be of better cheer'. As from some blissful neighbourhood, A notice faintly understood, 'I see the end, and know the good'. A little hint to solace woe, A hint, a whisper breathing low, 'I may not speak of what I know'.

61. Out upon the wharfs they came, Knight and Burgher, Lord and Dame, And around the prow they read her name, The Lady of Shalott. Who is this? And what is here? And in the lighted palace near Died the sound of royal cheer; And they crossed themselves for fear, All the Knights at Camelot; But Lancelot mused a little space He said, 'She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott.'

62. J'ai vu des archipels sideraux! et des iles Dont les cieux delirants sont ouverts au vogueur: Est-ce en ces nuits sans fond que tu dors et t'exiles, Million d'oiseaux d'or, o future Vigueur?

63. There paused to shut the door A fellow called the Wind, With mystery before, And reticence behind.

64. Existence: 'The mysteries we ostensibly perceive, though seemingly ubiquitous, are but mere stitches that hold the inconceivably vast fabric of the unknown tightly closed from our ever prying view.'

65. Life: 'Birth and death; we all move between these two unknowns.'

66. 'I want to know what it says,' he answered, looking steadily in her face. 'The sea Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?'

67. 'I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams, I will hold my light above them and seek their faces. I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins . . .' The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness, Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest, Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains.

68. We reach vague-gesturing hands, we lift our heads, Hear sounds far off,-and dream, with quivering breath, Our curious separate ways through life and death.

69. As darkness falls The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls Tremble and glow with the lives within them moving, Moving like music, secret and rich and warm. How shall we live tonight? Where shall we turn? To what new light or darkness yearn? A thousand winding stairs lead down before us; And one by one in myriads we descend By lamplit flowered walls, long balustrades, Through half-lit halls which reach no end.

70. Through soundless labyrinths of dream you pass, Through many doors to the one door of all. Soon as it's opened we shall hear a music: Or see a skeleton fall . . .

71. All that has sensation and growth - all matter, in short - will pass through man. When that has happened, the great Day of Judgment will come, and that is the end point of the mysteries in the philosophy of the prophets.

72. To leave the open fields and enter the forest, that was the rite. Knowing there was mystery, they could go. Go back now! And he receded among the multitude of forms, the twists and shadows they saw now, listening to the hum of the world's wood.

73. There was a boy A very strange enchanted boy...

74. Her tall figure, swathed in black, looking like some strange eccentric bird... she seemed like an ageing princess come home from exile.

75. There is something in Poetry beyond Prose-reason; there are Mysteries in it not to be explained, but admired.

76. 'Once upon a time, all we knew about Elvis was that he sang like a motherfucker; and that was all that mattered; you know, when you gas up and you go to pay inside the gas station and you hear Elvis singing Surrender, (1961), you know that the mystery of that guy, was everything; the voice, and the mystery, and the not knowing; and I think the great thing about anything that you hear over the waves is, you don't want to know too much, you know?'

77. Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter... And the rain and over the fields a voice calling...

78. Je m'en vais chercher un grand peut-etre; tirez le rideau, la farce est jouee.

79. I am saying to modern scientists and theologians: don't imagine that our latest ideas about the Big Bang or the human genome have solved the mysteries of the universe or the mysteries of life. Here are Bacon's words again: 'The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding'. In the last four hundred years, science has fulfilled many of Bacon's dreams, but it still does not come close to capturing the full subtlety of nature.

80. To talk about the end of science is just as foolish as to talk about the end of religion. Science and religion are both still close to their beginnings, with no ends in sight. Science and religion are both destined to grow and change in the millennia that lie ahead of us, perhaps solving some old mysteries, certainly discovering new mysteries of which we yet have no inkling.

81. My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God- nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?

82. Yet he is right enough about there being a white magic, if he only knows where to look for it.

83. One must paint all the phenomena of the world as an enigma.

84. I do also have a couple of surprises -- which I can't tell you, because then it wouln't be a surprise. So, don't ask what the surprise is. I'm not going to tell you.

85. When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go And you've just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low, Go ask Alice I think she'll know.

86. Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and horrors of De Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved and interpreted with an art which makes them immortal, and the world knows well the beauty, the terror and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the inspired dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no man has yet dared intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at the direction of the unheard-of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne.

87. Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments - inarticulateness. What I learned and saw in those hours of impious exploration can never be told - for want of symbols or suggestions in any language. I say this because from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations; sensations correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and space - things which at bottom possess no distinct and definite existence. Human utterance can best convey the general character of our experiences by calling them plungings or soarings...

88. I found myself projected against an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky clammy mass, if such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere. I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had successfully passed. Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug-dream...

89. Many of his questions seemed highly out of place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams.

90. The two sounds frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters 'Cthulhu ' and 'R'lyeh .'

91. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.

92. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.

93. West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs. The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night.

94. I cannot reach it, and my striving eye Dazzles at it, as at eternity.

95. What parts of the interior or the atmosphere give rise to the various phenomena, or indeed, if these regions have any parts at all, are questions which we ask of the stars in vain.

96. There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world. Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose.

97. Le monde offre enormement d'enigmes dont le mot parait difficile a trouver. Il y a des intrigues multipliees.

98. What a dark world-who knows?- Ours to inhabit is! One touch and what a strange Glory might burst on us, What a hid universe!

99. To many, perhaps to most people outside the small company of the great scholars, past and present, 'Celtic' of any sort is, nonetheless, a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come. ... Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.

100. I am doubtful myself about the undertaking. Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. Also many of the older legends are purely 'mythological', and nearly all are grim and tragic: a long account of the disasters that destroyed the beauty of the Ancient World, from the darkening of Valinor to the Downfall of Numenor and the flight of Elendil.