Quotes about secrets

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

We are alive within mystery, by miracle. "Life," wrote Erwin Chargaff, "is the continual intervention of the inexplicable." We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say. The constructions of language (which is to say the constructions of thought) are formed within experience, not the other way around. Finally we live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory. There is no reason whatever to assume that the languages of science are less limited than other languages.

Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.

There's a terrible dark joy when the only person who knows all your secrets is finally dead.

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.

Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.

There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand. I am practically industrious – painstaking, a workman to execute with perseverance and labour – but besides this there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore.

It is in general the unexplored that attracts us.

A secret's a terribly lonesome thing.

Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary — do you hear? Who are you in there?

I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.

It could be that the total scenario for human beings is an insoluble mystery until we die, followed by nothing at all.