Quotes about Mystery

Faith is not knowledge of what the mystery of the universe is, but the conviction that there is a mystery, and that it is greater than us.

They understand but little who understand only what can be explained.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all 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.

We are looking for a way to feel more real, but we do not realize that to feel more real we have to push ourselves further into the unknown.

We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.

Surrender to life itself and you'll just be rewarded with so many things. And I've been rewarded so many times, in so many mysterious ways. So I have no reason to be disappointed with anything.

No event for the Koyukon – or for most other indigenous peoples – is ever entirely meaningless or accidental, but neither is any event entirely predetermined or fated. Rather like the trickster, Raven, who first gave it its current form, the sensuous world is a spontaneous, playful and dangerous mystery in which we participate, an articulate and improvisational field of powers ever responsive to human actions and spoken words.

Godfulness is simply recognizing the primacy of a presence of love, spaciousness, grace, generativity, caring, and creativity in the world and in myself.  How can a mere financial crisis compare to that?  The Generative Mystery cannot go bankrupt.  It is not subject to scarcity. We never run out of God.

All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.

I believe everything is one thing only. That said, there are some questions in my life that I don’t know.. I’ve stopped asking. At the very beginning of my life, I wanted to have answers for everything. And now I respect the fact that I can’t have answers for everything.

Well, let's distinguish religion from spirituality. I am Catholic, so religion for me is a way of having discipline and collective worship with persons who share the same mystery.

So for the question I go to the mystery of it and say I don’t know. I only know that I am alive and there is something that manifests in my life, that it is God and one day I am going to understand my life, probably in the day that I die, or afterwards. But I try to find good questions and not good answers.

From a large planet of overwhelming magnitude, unlimited resources and endless mystery, the Earth has suddenly become a small planet, thoroughly explored, limited in resources, and reduced in mystery.

For peoples, generally, their story of the universe and the human role within the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. Only through this story of how the Universe came to be in the beginning and how it came to be as it is does a person come to appreciate the meaning of life or to derive the psychic energy needed to deal effectively with those crisis moments that occur in the life of the individual and in the life of the society. Such a story communicates the most sacred of mysteries. Our story not only interprets the past, it also guides and inspires our shaping of the future.

When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey.

There is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.

Science tends more and more to reveal to us the unity that underlies the diversity of nature.  We must have diversity in our practical lives; we must seize Nature by many handles.  But our intellectual lives demand unity, demand simplicity amid all this complexity.  Our religious lives demand the same.  Amid all the diversity of creeds and sects we are coming more and more to see that religion is one, that verbal differences and ceremonies are unimportant, and that the fundamental agreements are alone significant.  Religion as a key or passport to some other world has had its day; as a mere set of statements or dogmas about the Infinite mystery it has had its day.  Science makes us more and more at home in this world, and is coming more and more, to the intuitional mind, to have a religious value.  Science kills credulity and superstition but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the marvelous universe.  It quiets our fears and apprehensions, it pours oil upon the troubled waters of our lives, and reconciles us to the world as it is.

“There are three forces, the only three forces capable of conquering and enslaving forever the conscience of these weak rebels in the interests of their own happiness. They are: the miracle, the mystery and authority.”

Gather up your telegrams
Your faded pictures, best laid plans
Books and postcards, 45's
Every sunset in the sky

Carry with you maps and string, flashlights
Friends who make you sing
And stars to help you find your place
Music, hope and amazing grace

Maybe what we leave
Is nothing but a tangled little mystery
Maybe what we take
Is nothing that has ever had a name

Poets and mystics have been telling us for centuries: Wake up.  Wake to your true self.  Wake to your own connections to what is around you right now.  Gaze into someone's eyes, and discover who looks back.  Penetrate the mysteries where the worlds touch.  Don't go back to sleep.

Within walking distance of any spot on Earth there's probably more than enough mystery to investigate in a lifetime.

When I was five years old, the world was incomprehensible.  When I was thirteen, it seemed to me much smaller, much dirtier, and depressingly predictable.  Today it still seems muddled, but once again - although in a different way - as complex as when I was a child.  With age I have voluntarily chosen certain limitations.  I don't have the energy to start over again.  To learn new skills or fight my own personality or figure out diesel engines.

There is no mystery about what the future holds. Your actions today determine youe consequences tomorrow.

Dear, dear!  How queer everything is to-day!  And yesterday things went on just as usual.  I wonder if I've been changed in the night?  Let me think:  was I the same when I got up this morning?  I almost think I can remember feeling a little different.  But if I'm not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I?  Ah, that's the great puzzle!

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.  It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of all true art and science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.  It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion.  A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity;  in this sense, and, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.  It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of all true art and science.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.

It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world.

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.