Mysterious Quotes - Page 33

• Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Happiness, Thinking, Virtue

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “Collected Works”, New York, NY : Library of America : Distributed to the trade in the U.S. and Canada by Viking Press

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• I have very strongly this feeling that our everyday life is at one and the same time banal, overfamiliar, platitudinous and yet mysterious and extraordinary.

  Bryan Magee

  Life, Feelings, Everyday

  YouTube Channel "Manufacturing Intellect"/"Heidegger and Existentialism with Bryan Magee (1977)", www.youtube.com. September 17, 2017.

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• Force, force, everywhere force; we ourselves a mysterious force in the centre of that. "There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it: how else could it rot?" [As used in his time, by the word force, Carlyle means energy.]

  Thomas Carlyle

  Mean, Energy, Rotting

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• Every superior personality, and every superior performance, has, for the average of mankind, something mysterious.

  Georg Simmel

  Average, Personality, Mankind

  Georg Simmel, Otthein Rammstedt (2008). “Gesamtausgabe”

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• Too many poets write poems which are only difficult on the surface, difficult because the dramatic situation is easily misunderstood. It's not difficult to write poems that are misunderstood. A drunk, a three-year-old-they are easily misunderstood. What is difficult is being clear and mysterious at the same time. The dramatic situation needs to be as clear in a poem as it is in a piece of good journalism. The why is part of the mystery, but the who, what, where, and when should all be understood.

  Miller Williams

  Writing, Years, Dramatic Situations

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• War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.

  Milan Kundera

  War, Fighting, Years

  "Immortality". Book by Milan Kundera, 1990.

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• Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Cameras, Arms

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• The reason to preserve wilderness is that we need it. We need wilderness of all kinds, large and small, public and private. Wee need to go now and again into places where our work is disallowed, where our hopes and plans have no standing. We need to come into the presence of the unqualified and mysterious formality of Creation.

  Wendell Berry

  Needs, Unqualified, Kind

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• But above everything, drink wines with love. They are like women - different, mysterious, fickle. And each wine has to be taken like a woman. This always begins with a rejection, done gracefully or rudely according to the woman's disposition, and in the end she will grant herself only to someone, who aspires her soul as well as her body. She will belong to the one, who knows how to uncover her with the utmost delicacy.

  Luigi Veronelli

  Taken, Wine, Rejection

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• If the world goes crazy for a lovely fossil, that's fine with me. But if that fossil releases some kind of mysterious brain ray that makes people say crazy things and write lazy articles, a serious swarm of flies ends up in my ointment.

  Carl Zimmer

  Crazy, Writing, People

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• To call ourselves a Microcosme, or little world, I thought it onely a pleasant trope of Rhetorick, till my neare judgement and second thoughts told me there was a reall truth therein: for first wee are a rude masse, and in the ranke of creatures, which only are, and have a dull kinde of being not yet priviledged with life, or preferred to sense or reason; next we live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and at last the life of spirits, running on in one mysterious nature those five kinds of existence, which comprehend the creatures not onely of world, but of the Universe.

  Thomas Browne

  Running, Live Life, Animal

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• In the depths of the human soul... the desire to give meaning to one's own life is joined by the fleeting vision of beauty and of the mysterious unity of things.

  Pope John Paul II

  Faith, Inspiration, Giving

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• Not everybody, however, has a genuine sense of humor. That calls for an altruistic detachment from oneself and a mysterious sympathy with others which is felt even before they open their mouths. Only the person who has also a gift for affection can have a true sense of humor. A good laugh is a sign of love; it may be said to give us a glimpse of, or a first lesson in, the love that God bears for every one of us.

  Karl Rahner

  Giving, Laughing, Glimpse

  Karl Rahner (1973). “Belief today: three theological meditations”, Sheed & Ward Ltd

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• But the saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor. (Nor should the Karl Barth who so loved and understood Mozart be regarded as such.)For humor is a mysterious but unmistakable charism inseparable from Catholic faith, and neither the "progressives" nor the "integralists" seem to possess it - the latter even less than the former.

  Hans Urs von Balthasar

  Aunt, Catholic, Saint

  Hans Urs von Balthasar (2007). “The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church, 2nd Edition”, p.184, Ignatius Press

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• The world is not divided into two types of being, one superior and the other merely surrounding it. Being, nature, the universe - they are all one infinitely complex and mysterious metaorganism of which we are but a part, though a unique one.

  Vaclav Havel

  Inspiring, Unique, Two

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• The religious man, the mystic, tries to explore the mystery of death. In exploring the mystery of death, he inevitably comes to know what life is, what love is. Those are not his goals. His goal is to penetrate death, because there seems to be nothing more mysterious than death. Love has some mystery because of death, and life also has some mystery because of death.

  Rajneesh

  Death, Religious, Love Is

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• It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion.

  Iris Murdoch

  Sports, Struggle, Gun

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• All of us should remember that the federal government is not some mysterious institution comprised of buildings, files and paper. The people are the government. What we create we ought to be able to control.

  Ronald Reagan

  Government, People, Paper

  Reagan, Ronald (1982). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1981”, p.56, Best Books on

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• The Family is the Country of the heart. There is an angel in the Family who, by the mysterious influence of grace, of sweetness, and of love, renders the fulfillment of duties less wearisome, sorrows less bitter. The only pure joys unmixed with sadness which it is given to man to taste upon earth are, thanks to this angel, the joys of the Family.

  Giuseppe Mazzini

  Love, Country, Heart

  Giuseppe Mazzini (2005). “The Duties of Man and Other Essays”, p.60, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The air is the most mysterious, the most exciting, the most challenging of all the elements. We leave the planet, we leave the sea, we leave the earth. The air is no longer of this world .

  Arthur David Beaty

  Air, Sea, Challenges

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• The healing power of music is vast. Music therapy is in its infancy in Western psychology. If we knew more, we'd be able to do amazing things, and maybe even make permanent changes in the brain's mysterious workings. With a simple song and four chords, you might be able to do something useful, even life-changing. With all the songs you know, you might be a virtual, veritable medicine chest for the right person.

  Gary Talley

  Song, Life Changing, Healing

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• The tie is stronger than that between father and son and father and daughter. The bond is also more complex than the one between mother and daughter. For a woman, a son offers the best chance to know the mysterious male existence.

  Carol Klein

  Daughter, Mother, Father

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• I think our minds respond to things beyond this world. Take beauty: it's a very mysterious thing, isn't it? I think it's a response in our minds to perfection. It's too bad, people not realizing that their minds expand beyond this world.

  Agnes Martin

  Beauty, Thinking, Mysterious Things

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• One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual's own innocence self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.

  Herman Melville

  Depression, Dream, Thinking

  Pierre bk. 4 (1852)

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• There is not, in my opinion, anything more mysterious in nature than this instinct in animals, which thus rise above reason, and yet fall infinitely short of it.

  Joseph Addison

  Nature, Fall, Animal

  Joseph Addison, Richard Hurd, Henry George Bohn (1854). “The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison: The Tatler and Spectator [no. 1-160”, p.460

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