Mysterious Quotes - Page 10

• Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

  J. K. Rowling

  Perfectly Normal, Numbers, People

  J.K. Rowling (2015). “Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone”, p.9, Pottermore

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• I liked the solitude and the silence of the woods and the hills. I felt there the sense of a presence, something undefined and mysterious, which was reflected in the faces of the flowers and the movements of birds and animals, in the sunlight falling through the leaves and in the sound of running water, in the wind blowing on the hills and the wide expanse of earth and sky.

  Bede Griffiths

  Running, Flower, Fall

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• What was it, he wondered for the hundredth time, that enabled Pastor Harris to hear the answers in his heart? What did he mean when he said he felt God’s presence? Steve supposed he could ask Pastor Harris directly, but he doubted that would do any good. How could anyone explain such a thing? It would be like describing colors to someone blind from birth: The words might be understood, but the concept would remain mysterious and private.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Heart, Mean, Color

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• If one's intellectual equipment was not great, one's spiritual experience not deep, the result of doing one's very best could only seem very lightweight in comparison with the effort involved. But perhaps that was not important. The mysterious power that commanded men appeared to him to ask of them only obedience and the maximum of effort and to remain curiously indifferent as to the results.

  Elizabeth Goudge

  Spiritual, Men, Effort

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• He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Men, Law, Different

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1957). “Hadrian's Memoirs”

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• For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.

  Donald Miller

  Christian, People, Spirituality

  Donald Miller (2007). “Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God”, p.70, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Now culture being a social product, I firmly believe that any work of art should have a social function to beautify, to glorify, to dignify man... Since any social system is forced to change to another by concrete economic forces, its art changes also to be recharged, reshaped, and revitalized by the new conditions... The making of a genuine artist or writer is not mysterious. It is not
  the work of Divine Providence. Social conditions, history, and the people's struggle are the factors behind it.

  Carlos Bulosan

  Art, Believe, Struggle

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• Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It's too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you're both aware and unaware of it almost all the time, all you know is you'd die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It's a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.

  Caroline Knapp

  Single Mom, Simple, Air

  Caroline Knapp (1999). “Drinking: A Love Story”, p.8, Dial Press

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• All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout-nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be controlled and initiated by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I'll remain a member of the loyal opposition.

  Mo Yan

  Jobs, Mean, Love Is

  Mo Yan (2013). “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out: A Novel”, p.597, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• Like the entomologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.

  Santiago Ramon y Cajal

  Butterfly, Garden, Grey Matter

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• I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off.

  Harold Brodkey

  Sleep, Odds, Decay

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• Human life and objects and trees vibrate with mysterious meanings, which can be deciphered like cuneiform writing. There exists a meaning, hidden from day to day, but accessible in moments of greatest attentiveness, in those moments when consciousness loves the world.

  Adam Zagajewski

  Writing, Tree, Cuneiform

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• The creative processes are so mysterious.

  Jimmy Webb

  Creative, Process, Creative Process

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• The hippopotamus's day Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way- The Church can sleep and feed at once.

  T. S. Eliot

  Sleep, Night, Church

  T.S. Eliot (2015). “The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems”, p.43, Faber & Faber

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• Another effective [debugging] technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor.

  Brian Kernighan

  Sorry, Learning, Mind

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• The Phoenix riddle hath more wit By us, we two being one, are it. So to one neutral thing both sexes fit, We die and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love.

  John Donne

  Love, Sex, Phoenix

  John Donne, Theodore Redpath (2009). “The Songs and Sonets of John Donne”, p.238, Harvard University Press

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• Your cousin might be a pretty face, but you, my darling, courageous, maddening, seductive, mysterious, wonderful Diana, you are the Duchess of Wakefield. My duchess.

  Elizabeth Hoyt

  Love, Cousin, Seductive

  Elizabeth Hoyt (2013). “Duke of Midnight: Number 6 in series”, p.205, Hachette UK

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• Time is like a wheel. Turning and turning - never stopping. And the woods are the center; the hub of the wheel. It began the first week of summer, a strange and breathless time when accident, or fate, bring lives together. When people are led to do things, they've never done before. On this summersday, not so very long ago, the wheel set lives in motion in mysterious ways.

  Natalie Babbitt

  Summer, Fate, Long Ago

  "Tuck Everlasting". www.imdb.com. 2002.

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• And it’d be very hard to make up something as strange as the Dutch tulipmania in the seventeenth century, for example. Or the mysterious case of Thomas Clapper. Or the entire civic history of Seattle, Washington.

  Stephen Briggs

  Dutch, Example, Strange

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• A mountain has no need for people, but people do need mountains. We go to them for their beauty, for the exhilaration of standing closer to mysterious skies, for the feeling of triumph that comes from having labored to reach a summit.

  Earl Hamner, Jr.

  Sky, People, Feelings

  "Fictional character: Narrator". TV Series "The Waltons" ("The Hunt", 1972), www.imdb.com. (1971–1981).

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• When a man has done all he can do, still there is a mighty, mysterious agency over which he needs influence to secure success. The one way he can reach it is by prayer.

  Russell Conwell

  Prayer, Men, Agency

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• A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Book, Natural, Fungi

  1850 Journal entry,16 Nov. In Bradford Torrey and F H Allen (eds) The Journals of Henry David Thoreau (1906).

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• Opera stars know that biology is destiny. Sometime in their 50s or early 60s, the powerful, flexible and ultimately mysterious instrument that has been the source of their artistry frays, cracks and disappears.

  Michael A. Walsh

  Stars, Powerful, Destiny

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• The future is religion and commerce, aphrodisiac and Benzedrine, a mother of mysterious comfort and a mistress of familiar ravishments ever on the verge of embracing or destroying us.

  Eugene Kennedy

  Mother, Future, Mistress

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• Here and there in the ancient literature we encounter legends of wise and mysterious games that were conceived and played by scholars, monks, or the courtiers of cultured princes. These might take the form of chess games in which the pieces and squares had secret meanings in addition to their usual functions.

  Hermann Hesse

  Wise, Squares, Games

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