Literature

"Some things must needs gain in mystery before we can at all undertake to think upon them. Without mystery they are all obscure. Who can think, for instance, of the infinity of space without adding inconceivable things to his meditation?"

"Sex and death have in common the fact that they are the two biological aspects of the mysterium tremendum. Mystery—defined here as a situation in which the data impinge on the problem—has its ultimate meaning in these two human experiences."

"Why else lead a life of bad banquet dinners, cigar smoke, camp chairs, foul breath, and excruciatingly dull jargon if not to avoid the echoes of what is not known."

"Mystery is an emotion which is repugnant to a political animal."

"Mysteries are irritated by facts."

"The unwanting soul sees what's hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants. Two things, one origin, but different in name, whose identity is mystery. Mystery of all mysteries! The door to the hidden."

"Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery. By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real. Yet mystery and reality emerge from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness born from darkness. The beginning of all understanding."

"Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding."

"Tao can be talked about, but not the Eternal Tao. Names can be named, but not the Eternal Name. As the origin of heaven-and-earth, it is nameless: As "the Mother" of all things, it is nameable. So, as ever hidden, we should look at its inner aspects. As always manifest, we should look at its outer aspects. These two flow from the same source, though differently named; And both are called mysteries. The Mystery of mysteries is the Door of all essence."

"Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery."

"We met in secret : mystery is to love Like perfume to the flower ; the maiden's blush Looks loveliest when her cheek is pale with fear."

"The personal mystery of medieval man has been largely destroyed by capitalistic technicism and bourgeois scientism. There was always something mystical in personal creation as well as a "secret" in manual, artistic skills; convents and monasteries jealously kept the secret of their liquors; craftsmen had their secrets and so had doctors, alchemists, astrologers, and pharmacists in their more or less dark trades. Mystics, hermits, midwives, cooks, and violin builders harbored their secrets. Nature was full of unpenetrable mysteries and strange events; the scarcity of written documents furthered the growth of sagas, folklore, and legends. But not only man, nature, and life had their mysteries; even today we speak of the mysteries of the Rosary, of the Mass. In the Armenian Rite of the Catholic Church a veil is spread between the altar and audience during the Consecration of the Host. These mysteries on the other hand, personal as they might be, were far from creating walls between human beings who were by them not less magnetically attracted than by distance. Bodies are mutually attracted by nearness, knowledge, and pleasure but souls by distance, mystery, and suffering."

"I'm for mystery, not interpretive answers. … The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."

"The angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: but in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants the prophets."

"Reason quite properly rejects contradiction, but rationalism abhors mystery, which every heresy attempts in its own way to resolve."

"There are some mysteries so big that they will take the whole world to solve them."

"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."

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

"Everybody is wonderin' what and where they all came from. Everybody is worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done. But no one knows for certain 'n' so it's all the same to me. I think I'll just let the mystery be."

"It seems to me there is so much more to the world than the average eye is allowed to see. I believe if you look hard, there are more wonders in this universe than you could ever have dreamed of. It's colour! Colour that holds the key! I can hear the colours, listen to them. Every time I step outside, I feel nature is shouting at me. Come on! Come and get me! Come on! Capture my mystery!"

"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”"

"I want to hear you laugh. Don't let the mystery go now."

"Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers."

"I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification."

"Augustine discussed the Trinity by means of an analogy with the three fundamental phases of personality—knowing, willing, and feeling—although ultimately he believed it to be a mystery beyond human comprehension. God is the perfection of knowledge, power, and good will. His attributes are omniscience, omnipotence, and ."

"Man has always been afraid of anything mysterious, forgetting that the key to the mystery is within himself. One must free oneself from all impeding conditions or circumstances, which are different for everyone. Progress depends upon free will that is directed toward good."

"Just as nature abhors a vacuum, our minds abhor a mystery.""

"Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance."

"A true gentleman leaves no puzzle unsolved"

"Luke, this reminds me of a puzzle"

"Can you think of any reason why someone would kill him?" The troll scratched his head. "Well, 'cos dey wanted him dead, I reckon. Dat's a good reason."

"Ride, captain ride, upon your mystery ship, Be amazed, at the friends, you have here on your trip. Ride, captain ride, upon your mystery ship, On your way, to a world, that others might have missed."

"The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry. We are as helpless today to define mass, fundamentally, as Newton was. But we do not therefore think, and neither did he, that the equations which contain mass as an unknown are mere rules of thumb."

"Metaphors and Similes are the beginning of the democratic system of envy."

"The progress of science requires more than new data; it needs novel frameworks and contexts. And where do these fundamentally new views of the world arise? They are not simply discovered by pure observation; they require new modes of thought. And where can we find them, if old modes do not even include the right metaphors? The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness. The basic chanciness and unpredictability of science must also reside in the inherent difficulty of such a task."

"Metaphors hide in plain sight, and their influence is largely unconscious. We should mind our metaphors, though, because metaphors make up our minds."

"In the interpretation of figurative passages, let the following canon be observed. If the passage be preceptive, either forbidding some flagitious deed and some heinous crime, or commanding something useful and beneficent: then such passage is not figurative. But, if the passage seems, either to command some flagitious deed and some heinous crime, or to forbid something useful and beneficent: then such passage is figurative. Thus, for example, Christ says: Unless ye shall eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood; ye shall have no life in you. Now, in these words, he seems to command a heinous crime or a flagitious deed. Therefore the passage is a figure, enjoining us to communicate in the passion of our Lord, and admonishing us to lay it up sweetly and usefully in our memory because, for us, his flesh was crucified and wounded. On the other hand, Scripture says: If thy enemy shall hunger, give him food; if he shall thirst, give him drink. Here, without all doubt, an act of beneficence is enjoined."

"For the [Kogi and Ika] Indians of the Sierra, everything begins and ends with the loom, and the metaphor of thread in the cosmic cloth. Constantly on the move as they gather food and various resources, the Indians refer to their wanderings as "weavings", each journey a thread woven into a sacred cloak over the Great Mother, each seasonal movement a prayer for the well-being of the people and the entire Earth. When the people of the Sierra plant a field, the women sow lines of crops parallel to the sides of the plot. The men work their way across the field in a horizontal direction. The result, should the domains of man and woman be superimposed one upon the other, is a fabric. The garden is a piece of cloth."

"When you told me you used to chase tornados I always thought it was a metaphor!"

"All metaphors, at least such of them that are best chosen, are applied to the senses, especially the seeing, which of all senses is the most exquisite. Thus when we say, the tincture of politeness, the softness of good-breeding, the murmer of waters, and sweetness of language; these metaphors are all taken from the other senses. But the metaphors taken from the sense of seeing are much more striking, because they place in the eye of the imagination objects... otherwise... impossible for us to see or comprehend. For there is nothing in nature but what we may adapt its name to signify something else; and every object from which a likeness may be raised, as it may from all objects, if metaphorically applied..."

"In short, the use of metaphor involves both the awareness of duality of sense and the pretense that the two different senses are one."

"There is a remedy against the domination imposed, not by generals, statesmen, and men of action, whose power dissolves when they retire, but by the great sort-crossers, whose power increases when they die- the remedy of becoming aware of metaphor..."

"The mechanical philosophy is a case of being victimized by metaphor. I choose Descartes and Newton as excellent examples of metaphysicians of mechanism malgré eux, that is to say, as unconscious victims of the metaphor of the great machine. Together they have founded a church, more powerful than that founded by Peter and Paul, whose dogmas are now so entrenched that anyone who tries to reallocate the facts is guilty of more than heresy...there is a remedy against the domination imposed, not by generals, statesmen, and men of action, whose power dissolves when they retire, but by the great sort-crossers, whose power increases when they die-the remedy of becoming aware of metaphor..."

"In order to understand, in the case of miracles, what actually took place, we ought to be familiar with Jewish phrases and metaphors; anyone who did not make sufficient allowance for these, would be continually seeing miracles in Scripture where nothing of the kind is intended by the writer; he would thus miss the knowledge not only of what actually happened, but also of the mind of the writers of the sacred text."

"The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot [and left behind] inside one of His creatures when He made him."

"The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself."

"Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept."

"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins."

"We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities."

"All words, in every language, are metaphors."