Quotes about secrets

165 quotes · 114 authors

Quotes

  1. I fear that if the matter is beyond humanity it is certainly beyond me. Yet we must exhaust all natural explanations before we fall back upon such a theory as this.

    p. 958

  2. As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be.

  3. You know a conjurer gets no credit when once he has explained his trick; and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all.

    p. 33

  4. The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

  5. I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.

  6. Behind every mystery lies another mystery. Infinite recession. But you don't need to know final answers — if there be such — and neither do I.

    p. 403

  7. We are all so simple at heart that we become unfathomable to one another.

  8. It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing — atoms with curiosity — that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

  9. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed His pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out — without putting it in secretly!

    p. 129

  10. While I am describing to you how Nature works, you won't understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that.

    p. 10

  11. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get "down the drain", into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

    p. 129

  12. Does a populace have informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority's forces? History already has answered that question. Every society in the ConSentiency today reflects the historical judgment that failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents an ultimate crime.

    p. 246