mystery

Rudolph (the leading character): If you's go stop three tradesmen on the street, and ask the three what it is they live by, they'll reply at once, bread, meat and drink, and they'll be certain of it; victuals and drink, like the rhyme in Mother Goose, makes up their diet; nothing will be said of faith in things unseen, or following the gleam, just bread and meat and a can of wine to wash it down. But if you know them well, behind the fish-eyes and the bellies, if you know them better than they do, each one burns candles at some alter of his mind in secret; in secret often, from himself, each is a priest to some dim mystery by which he lives. Strip him of that, and bread and meat and wine won't nourish him . . . without his . . . hidden faith, he dies and goes to dust.

We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides, The spirit bloweth and is still, In mystery our soul abides: But tasks in hours of insight will'd Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd.

God is the "mysterium tremendum," that appears and overthrows, but he is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.

I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person.

For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries of life disappear and life stands explained.

Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex.

If a nonnegative quantity was so small that it is smaller than any given one, then it certainly could not be anything but zero. To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero. Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as they are usually believed to be. These supposed mysteries have rendered the calculus of the infinitely small quite suspect to many people. Those doubts that remain we shall thoroughly remove in the following pages, where we shall explain this calculus.

Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate.

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery.