Quotes about Enigma

Life is strange, and often imponderable!

It reminds me of a remark Lucien [Carr] once made to me: He said You never seem to give yourself away completely, but of course dark-haired people are so mysterious.

The greatest mystery of existence is existence itself.

Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection.

The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.

What is unique about the 'I' hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual 'I' is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.

Something very strange is going on in the depths of space.

Why does Alexander the Great never tell us about the exact location of his tomb, Fermat about his Last Theorem, John Wilkes Booth about the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, Hermann Göring about the Reichstag fire? Why don't Sophocles, Democritus, and Aristarchus dictate their lost books?

Theodicy ... what is involved is not a theoretical answer to the enigma of evil ... but an answer of faith ... the abstract questions of theodicy fall away in the shadow of the event of the cross.

Happiness is a mystery like religion, and it should never be rationalized.

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like.

By a curious coincidence, as each point was recalled, the black wizards of Ashantee would strike up with their hatchets, as in ominous comment on the white stranger's thoughts. Pressed by such enigmas and portents, it would have been almost against nature, had not, even into the least distrustful heart, some ugly misgivings obtruded.