Inscrutable Quotes

• This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Science, Thinking, Magic In The World

  Thomas Carlyle, Henry Duff Traill (2010). “The Works of Thomas Carlyle”, p.8, Cambridge University Press

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• Familiarity with nature never breeds contempt. The more one learns, the more one expects surprises, and the more one becomes aware of the inscrutable.

  Archibald Rutledge

  Nature, Surprise, Contempt

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• I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

  Louise Bogan

  Happiness, Beauty, Encouragement

  Louise Bogan (1973). “What the woman lived: selected letters of Louise Bogan, 1920-1970”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• The nearest approximation to an understanding of life is to feel it--to realize it to the full--to be a profound and inscrutable mystery.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Life, Profound, Understanding

  Christian Nestell Bovee (1862). “Intuitions and Summaries of Thought”, p.11

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• The ways of Providence being inscrutable, and the justice of it not to be scanned by the shallow eye of humanity, nor to be counteracted by the utmost efforts of human power or wisdom, resignation, and as far as the strength of our reason and religion can carry us, a cheerful acquiescence to the Divine Will, is what we are to aim.

  George Washington

  Eye, Justice, Effort

  George Washington, John Clement Fitzpatrick, David Maydole Matteson, United States George Washington Bicentennial Commission (1944). “The writings of George Washington from the original manuscript sources, 1745-1799: prepared under the direction of the United States George Washington bicentennial commission and published by authority of Congress”

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• I was a fan of Hitchcock, but more importantly than that, he is such an inscrutable man, and a very carefully inscrutable man. He apparently was blank-faced with a calm and controlled presence. I was immediately anxious and thought, 'How am I going to get behind that?'

  Toby Jones

  Men, Fans, Calm

  "Toby Jones Talks THE GIRL, the Process of Finding Alfred Hitchcock, THE HUNGER GAMES, HARRY POTTER, and More". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. October 20, 2012.

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• One pits his wits against apparently inscrutable nature, wooing her with ardor but nature is blind justice who cannot recognize personal identity.

  Charles Brenton Huggins

  Justice, Identity, Pits

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• Cats must have three names-an everyday name, such as Peter; a more particular, dignified name, such as Quaxo, Bombalurina, or Jellylorum; and, thirdly, the name the cat thinks up for himself, his deep and inscrutable singular Name.

  T. S. Eliot

  Cat, Thinking, Names

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• Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Colour also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to life, and above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on colour at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work.

  Max Beckmann

  Beautiful, Spiritual, Expression

  "On my Painting". Max Beckmann's Speech during the exhibition 'Twentieth-Century German Art', London, July 21, 1938.

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• I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable.

  Orson Welles

  Hate, Way, Abstract

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• Every day is like a kid's drawing, offered to you with a strange mix of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.

  Michael Chabon

  Kids, Drawing, Balls

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• I have always felt that no matter how inscrutable its ways and means, the universe is working perfectly and working according to a greater plan than we can know.

  John Perry Barlow

  Mean, Matter, Way

  "The Death of Cynthia Horner" by John Perry Barlow, w2.eff.org. April 1994.

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• For there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence.

  Joseph Conrad

  Sea, Mistress, Mysterious

  Joseph Conrad (2008). “Heart of Darkness and Other Tales”, OUP Oxford

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• I must follow the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.

  Bill Watterson

  Soul, My Soul

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• O jest unseen, inscrutable, invisible, As a nose on a man's face, or a weathercock on a steeple.

  William Shakespeare

  Men, Unseen, Noses

  William Shakespeare, Nikolaus Delius (1858). “Shakespere's Werke”, p.28

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• We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Journey, Reality, Thinking

  "The Crossing". Book by Cormac McCarthy, 1994.

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• There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.

  Herman Melville

  Sea, Tides, Rolling

  Herman Melville (2016). “Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale”, p.151, Cosimo, Inc.

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• So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Two, Tea, World

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoirs, correspondence and private papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. by T.J. Randolph”, p.91

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• A young lady's most natural ally is her sister although sometimes our own relatives are as inscrutable to us as an antipodean.

  Anna Godbersen

  Allies, Sometimes, Natural

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• O wise humanity, terribly wise humanity! How inscrutable is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living and forget to play!

  Lin Yutang

  Wise, Men, Hair

  Lin Yutang (1937). “The Importance of Living”

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• I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.

  Billy Collins

  Thinking, Should Have, Perfect

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• In man's life, time is but a moment; being, a flux; sense is dim; the material frame corruptible; soul, an eddy of breath; fortune a thing inscrutable, and fame precarious.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Life, Men, Soul

  Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) (1920). “Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself: In English”

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• to become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words...the tangent to the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. the world of things we perceive is but a veil. It’s flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it conceals is inscrutable. It’s silence remains unbroken; no words can carry it away. Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear--filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Lying, Heart, Curves

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• God does not punish directly. His ways are inscrutable.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  God, Doe, Way

  Mahatma Gandhi, Judith M. Brown (2008). “The Essential Writings”, p.203, Oxford University Press

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• Cruel, but composed and bland,
  Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
  So Tiberius might have sat,
  Had Tiberius been a cat.

  Matthew Arnold

  Cat, Dumb, Might

  'Poor Matthias' (1885) l. 40

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