Mysterious Quotes - Page 18

• The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.

  Albert Einstein

  Beautiful, Art, Community

  "The World as I See It". Book by Albert Einstein (p. 44), 1931.

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• Religions are not proved, are not demonstrated, are not established, are not overthrown by logic! They are of all the mysteries of nature and the human mind, the most mysterious and most inexplicable; they are of instinct and not of reason.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Mind, Religion, Logic

  Alphonse de Lamartine (1850). “Travels in the East: Including a Journey in the Holy Land”, p.171

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• The nature of Christ's existence is mysterious, I admit; but this mystery meets the wants of man. Reject it, and the world is an inexplicable riddle; believe it, and the history of our race is satisfactorily explained.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Believe, Men, Race

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• In art the Greeks were the children of the Egyptians. The day may yet come when we shall do justice to the high powers of that mysterious and imaginative people.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Art, Children, Justice

  Benjamin Disraeli (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Benjamin Disraeli (Illustrated)”, p.1154, Delphi Classics

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• Two angels guide
  The path of man, both aged and yet young.
  As angels are, ripening through endless years,
  On one he leans: some call her Memory,
  And some Tradition; and her voice is sweet,
  With deep mysterious accords: the other,
  Floating above, holds down a lamp with streams
  A light divine and searching on the earth,
  Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields,
  Yet clings with loving check, and shines anew,
  Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp
  Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked
  But for Tradition; we walk evermore
  To higher paths by brightening Reason's lamp.

  George Eliot

  Sweet, Memories, Eye

  George Eliot (2016). “Complete Works Of George Eliot”, p.2724, ShandonPress via PublishDrive

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• the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims ... to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.

  George Eliot

  Spring, Inspiration, Growing

  George Eliot (2016). “The Mill On The Floss”, p.574, George Eliot

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• No education deserves the name unless it develops thought, unless it pierces down to the mysterious spiritual principle of mind, and starts that into activity and growth.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Education, Spiritual, Names

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.95

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• It is a curious paradox that precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity, to those mysterious powers assumed by others; and in those regions of darkness and ignorance where man cannot effect even those things that are within the power of man, there we shall ever find that a blind belief in feats that are far beyond those powers has taken the deepest root in the minds of the deceived, and produced the richest harvest to the knavery of the deceiver.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Taken, Ignorance, Men

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”

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• It is an exquisite and beautiful thing in our nature, that, when the heart is touched and softened by some tranquil happiness or affectionate feeling, the memory of the dead comes over it most powerfully and irresistibly. It would seem almost as though our better thoughts and sympathies were charms, in virtue of which the soul is enabled to hold some vague and mysterious intercourse with the spirits of those whom we loved in life. Alas! how often and how long may these patient angels hover around us, watching for the spell which is so soon forgotten!

  Charles Dickens

  Beautiful, Death, Memories

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• Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors are mysterious apparitions who come, go, and do strange unfathomable thing in and around the child, the region's only enfranchised citizen.

  Maya Angelou

  Children, Sibling, Real

  Maya Angelou (2008). “Letter to My Daughter”, p.7, Random House

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• Ah, the mysterious croak. Here today, gone tomorrow. It's the best reason I can think of to throw open the blinds and risk belief. Right now, this minute, time to move out into the grief and glory. High tide.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Grief, Moving, Thinking

  Barbara Kingsolver (2011). “High Tide in Tucson”, p.198, Faber & Faber

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• a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Writing, Discovery

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3994, Delphi Classics

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• Economics anxiety may be even more common than the often identified 'math anxiety,' for unlike math, which has its personal uses, economics is seen as a mysterious set of forces manipulated from above.

  Gloria Steinem

  Math, Anxiety, Use

  Gloria Steinem (2012). “Moving Beyond Words: Essays on Age, Rage, Sex, Power, Money, Muscles: Breaking the Boundaries of Gender”, p.355, Open Road Media

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• Friendship is a mysterious and ocean-bottom thing. Who can know the outer ranges of it? Perhaps no human being has ever explored its limits.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Friendship, Ocean, Limits

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• He knows enough, the mariner, who knows
  Where lurk the shelves, and where the whirlpools boil,
  What signs portend the storm: to subtler minds
  He leaves to scan, from what mysterious cause
  Charybdis rages in the Ionian wave;
  Whence those impetuous currents in the main
  Which neither oar nor sail can stem; and why
  The roughening deep expects the storm, as sure
  As red Orion mounts the shrouded heaven.

  John Armstrong

  Sea, Heaven, Mind

  John Armstrong, John Dyer (1858). “The Poetical Works of Armstrong, Dyer, and Green: With Memoirs, and Critical Dissertations”, p.37

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• simply to ask a blessing upon one's circumstances, whatever they are, is somehow to improve them, and to tap some mysterious source of energy and joy.

  Marjorie Holmes

  Prayer, Blessing, Joy

  Marjorie Holmes (1982). “I've/Talk/Somebd/God”, Bantam Books

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• For mysterious things of faith, rely on the proponent, Heaven's authority.

  John Dryden

  Faith, Mysterious Things, Heaven

  John Dryden, Paul Hammond, David Hopkins (2007). “Dryden: Selected Poems”, p.399, Pearson Education

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• Death only this mysterious truth unfolds,
  The mighty soul how small a body holds.

  John Dryden

  Death, Soul, Body

  John Dryden, Keith Walker (2003). “The Major Works”, p.366, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Nor turned I ween Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites Mysterious of connubial love refused: Whatever hypocrites austerely talk Of purity and place and innocence, Defaming as impure what God declares Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.

  John Milton

  Hypocrite, Innocence, Purity

  'Paradise Lost' (1667) bk. 4, l. 738

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• The father's life is surrounded by mysterious prestige: the hours he spends in the home, the room where he works, the objects around him, his occupations, his habits, have a sacred character. It is he who feeds the family, is the one in charge and the head. Usually he works outside the home, and it is through him that the household communicates with the rest of the world: he is the embodiment of this adventurous, immense, difficult, and marvelous world; he is transcendence, he is God.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Father, Home, Character

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• Our opposition will never understand the Democratic Party. Our Party is--to the unpracticed eyes of the old Republican Tories--a mysterious contraption that usually seems to be moving in a thousand directions. What they don't know is what hurts them. For all that movement in the Democratic Party is caused by the internal combustion of creative ferment, of ideas, of people vigorously committed to the proposition that change and social progress are not only to be desired; they are necessities of twentieth-century America.

  Hubert H. Humphrey

  Hurt, Moving, Party

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• By the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young; but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.

  Edmund Burke

  Moving, Fall, Race

  Edmund Burke (1999). “The Portable Edmund Burke”, p.405, Penguin

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• Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word.

  Rebecca West

  Cat, Doubt, Comfort

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• The very essence of gravity was design, and, consequently, deceit; it was a taught trick to gain credit of the world for more sense end knowledge than a man was worth; and that with all its pretensions it was no better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it--a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind.

  Laurence Sterne

  Men, Essence, Long Ago

  Laurence Sterne (1834). “The Works of Laurence Sterne, in One Volume”, p.17

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• Vermont tradition is based on the idea that group life should leave each person as free as possible to arrange his own life. This freedom is the only climate in which (we feel) a human being may create his own happiness. ... Character itself lies deep and secret below the surface, unknown and unknowable by others. It is the mysterious core of life, which every man or woman has to cope with alone, to live with, to conquer and put in order, or to be defeated by.

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher

  Lying, Character, Men

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