Mysterious Quotes - Page 18

• Give me bitter years of sickness, Suffocation, insomnia, fever, Take my child and my lover, And my mysterious gift of song This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays.

  Anna Akhmatova

  Song, Children, Insomnia

  Anna Andreevna Akhmatova (1993). “A stranger to heaven and earth: poems of Anna Akhmatova”, Shambhala Pubns

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• ..the real world's all we've got. Believers in the supernatural claim to have special wisdom about the world. But real wisdom means knowing truth from falsehood, knowing the difference between evidence and wishful thinking. Yes, the real world is mysterious and sometimes frightening. But would the supernatural make it better? The real world has beauty, poetry, love and the joy of honest discovery. Isn't that enough?

  John Stossel

  Real, Mean, Thinking

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• The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Spiritual, Art, Secret

  Wassily Kandinsky (1914). “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, p.53, Courier Corporation

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• Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of "artists.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Historical, Born

  Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

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• The tension of a mysterious danger is even more unbearable than danger itself. People hate the vacuum of an unknown situation. They want security. They even prefer war to the insecure expectation of a war with its threat of enemy surprise. This vague fearful expectation acts on their fantasies. They anticipate all kinds of mysterious dangers; they begin to provoke them. It is the evocation of fear and danger in order to escape the tension of insecurity.

  Joost Meerloo

  Hate, War, Insecure

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• To imagine that "God moves in mysterious ways" is to put up a smokescreen of mystery behind which fantasy may survive in spite of all the facts.

  Barbara Smoker

  Moving, Atheism, Way

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• For centuries poets, some poets, have tried to give a voice to the animals, and readers, some readers, have felt empathy and sorrow. If animals did have voices, and they could speak with the tongues of angels-at the very least with the tongues of angels-they would be unable to save themselves from us. What good would language do? Their mysterious otherness has not saved them, nor have their beautiful songs and coats and skins and shells and eyes.

  Joy Williams

  Beautiful, Song, Eye

  Joy Williams (2015). “Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals”, p.123, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Mankind, transmitting from generation to generation the legacy of accumulated vengeances, and pursuing with the feelings of duty the misery of their fellow-beings, have not failed to attribute to the Universal Cause a character analogous with their own. The image of this invisible, mysterious Being is more or less excellent and perfect — resembles more or less its original — in proportion to the perfection of the mind on which it is impressed.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  God, Character, Perfect

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1859). “Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources : Now First Printed”, p.270

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• I have been into many of the ancient cathedrals - grand, wonderful, mysterious. But I always leave them with a feeling of indignation because of the generations of human beings who have struggled in poverty to build these altars to the unknown god.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Women, Feelings, Religion

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriot (Stanton). Blatch (Mrs) (1922). “Elizabeth Cady Stanton as revealed in her letters, diary and reminiscences”

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• Two angels guide
  The path of man, both aged and yet young.
  As angels are, ripening through endless years,
  On one he leans: some call her Memory,
  And some Tradition; and her voice is sweet,
  With deep mysterious accords: the other,
  Floating above, holds down a lamp with streams
  A light divine and searching on the earth,
  Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields,
  Yet clings with loving check, and shines anew,
  Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp
  Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked
  But for Tradition; we walk evermore
  To higher paths by brightening Reason's lamp.

  George Eliot

  Sweet, Memories, Eye

  George Eliot (2016). “Complete Works Of George Eliot”, p.2724, ShandonPress via PublishDrive

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• No education deserves the name unless it develops thought, unless it pierces down to the mysterious spiritual principle of mind, and starts that into activity and growth.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Education, Spiritual, Names

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.95

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• It is a curious paradox that precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity, to those mysterious powers assumed by others; and in those regions of darkness and ignorance where man cannot effect even those things that are within the power of man, there we shall ever find that a blind belief in feats that are far beyond those powers has taken the deepest root in the minds of the deceived, and produced the richest harvest to the knavery of the deceiver.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Taken, Ignorance, Men

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”

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• Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors are mysterious apparitions who come, go, and do strange unfathomable thing in and around the child, the region's only enfranchised citizen.

  Maya Angelou

  Children, Sibling, Real

  Maya Angelou (2008). “Letter to My Daughter”, p.7, Random House

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• a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Writing, Discovery

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3994, Delphi Classics

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• He knows enough, the mariner, who knows
  Where lurk the shelves, and where the whirlpools boil,
  What signs portend the storm: to subtler minds
  He leaves to scan, from what mysterious cause
  Charybdis rages in the Ionian wave;
  Whence those impetuous currents in the main
  Which neither oar nor sail can stem; and why
  The roughening deep expects the storm, as sure
  As red Orion mounts the shrouded heaven.

  John Armstrong

  Sea, Heaven, Mind

  John Armstrong, John Dyer (1858). “The Poetical Works of Armstrong, Dyer, and Green: With Memoirs, and Critical Dissertations”, p.37

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• simply to ask a blessing upon one's circumstances, whatever they are, is somehow to improve them, and to tap some mysterious source of energy and joy.

  Marjorie Holmes

  Prayer, Blessing, Joy

  Marjorie Holmes (1982). “I've/Talk/Somebd/God”, Bantam Books

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• Death only this mysterious truth unfolds,
  The mighty soul how small a body holds.

  John Dryden

  Death, Soul, Body

  John Dryden, Keith Walker (2003). “The Major Works”, p.366, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Nor turned I ween Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites Mysterious of connubial love refused: Whatever hypocrites austerely talk Of purity and place and innocence, Defaming as impure what God declares Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.

  John Milton

  Hypocrite, Innocence, Purity

  'Paradise Lost' (1667) bk. 4, l. 738

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• By the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young; but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.

  Edmund Burke

  Moving, Fall, Race

  Edmund Burke (1999). “The Portable Edmund Burke”, p.405, Penguin

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• Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word.

  Rebecca West

  Cat, Doubt, Comfort

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• Vermont tradition is based on the idea that group life should leave each person as free as possible to arrange his own life. This freedom is the only climate in which (we feel) a human being may create his own happiness. ... Character itself lies deep and secret below the surface, unknown and unknowable by others. It is the mysterious core of life, which every man or woman has to cope with alone, to live with, to conquer and put in order, or to be defeated by.

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher

  Lying, Character, Men

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• As a believer, I know that Jesus Christ has a plan and it's not going to be my plan. It's not always succeeding and looking back it's amazing looking back to see how God works in mysterious ways, not always good ways, rough ways but those rough times, those rough patches, and those swamps and all those things that I went through are looking back, were such an incredible life lessons for me not only to shape and build me as an athlete but most importantly, my character as a person.

  Jennie Finch

  Jesus, Life Lesson, Athlete

  Interview with Gary Leland, fastpitch.tv. March 13, 2014.

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• Cynics know the answers without having penetrated deeply enough to know the questions. When challenged by mysterious truths, they marshall 'facts.

  Marilyn Ferguson

  Answers, Facts, Cynicism

  Marilyn Ferguson (1987). “The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s”, Tarcher

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• A girl's brain is mysterious, but only in a superficial way-a way very exasperating to me.

  James Agee

  Girl, Brain, Intelligence

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• I want to make photographs whose very ambiguity provokes thought, rather than cuts it off prematurely. I want to make pictures that work on a more mysterious level, that approach the truth by a more circuitous route.

  John Pfahl

  Cutting, Levels, Want

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