If you can look at yourself without condemning what you see, without comparing yourself with somebody else, without wishing to be more beautiful or more virtuous; if you can just observe what you are and move with it, then you will find that it is possible to go infinitely far. Then there is no end to the journey, and that is the mystery, the beauty of it.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
Learn your theories well but put them aside when you confront the mystery of the living soul.
—Carl Jung
Sex appeal is fifty percent what you’ve got and fifty percent what people think you’ve got.
—Sophia Loren
Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it’s in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.
—Nicholas Sparks in The Last Song
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?
—Jeanette Winterson
We keep thinking of deity as a kind of fact, somewhere; God as a fact. God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery. The mystery is what’s important.
—Joseph Campbell
The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.
—Andre Malraux
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
—Raymond Chandler
The first mystery is simply that there is a mystery, a mystery that can never be explained or understood, only encountered from time to time. Nothing is obvious. Everything conceals something else.
—Lawrence Kushner
Sexual love is the most stupendous fact of the universe, and the most magical mystery our poor blind senses know.
—Amy Lowell
The greatest mystery is in unsheathed reality itself.
—Eudora Welty
They gave him a seashell: "So you'll learn to love the water." They opened a cage and let a bird go free: "So you'll learn to love the air." They gave him a geranium: "So you'll learn to love the earth." And they gave him a little bottle sealed up tight. "Don't ever, ever open it. So you'll learn to love mystery.
—Eduardo Galeano
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
—Mark Twain
I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.
—Anne Lamott