Life Enigmatic Quotes & Sayings

The combination of our mortality with our groundlessness imparts to human life its pressing and enigmatic character. We struggle to in our brief time in the midst of an impenetrable darkness. A small area is lighted up: our civilizations, our sciences, our loves. We prove unable to define the place of the lighted area within a larger space devoid of light, and must go to our deaths unenlightened. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

So now you must choose ... Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so? To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable - bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder ... — Jostein Gaarder

The temporal immortality of the soul of man, that is to say, its eternal survival also after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being. — Wassily Kandinsky

The only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous - so full of hope. — Joseph Conrad

My favorite actors are actors who are enigmatic and mysterious and never make the obvious choice in terms of the projects they do or who they work with or their craft. But I think that the less I know about an actor, the more chance I have of allowing their own persona to kind of slip away so I can get completely lost in the character they're playing, and the more that people think they know about your personal life, the more difficult it becomes to preserve that. — Scarlett Johansson

The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings. — Anthony Powell

This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. to him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable - bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. You might say that throughout his life a philosopher remains as thin-skinned as a child. — Jostein Gaarder

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general. — Virginia Woolf

You must ceremonially commit your life to the ocean. You must marry her, knowing she is like all women, fickle and deadly but irresistibly seductive and enigmatic. — Jacob K. Ray

Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of scrupulous abnegation.The only legitimate of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous
so full of hope. They exist! And this is the only fundamental truth of fiction. — Joseph Conrad

The Unexpected Gift
Torn asunder from her slumber
in the hour of half past three
The child knew the tyrannical regime
and followed instinctively.
-(slice from Enigmatic Evolution) — Muse

All forms of art are parallel expressions. Writing is not unlike painting or other artistic endeavors. Each artistic endeavor is an expression of the mystery of the world. The job of the artist is to deepen that mystery, express reverence for the mystery of life, and explore the enigmatic aspects of human nature. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The years ... when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything was then. — C. G. Jung

The creative artist has something in common with the hero. Though functioning on another plane, he too believes that he has solutions to offer. He gives his life to accomplish imaginary triumphs. At the conclusion of every grand experiment, whether by statesman, warrior, poet or philosopher, the problems of life present the same enigmatic complexion. The happiest people, it is said, are those which have no history. Those which have a history, those which have made history, seem only to have emphasized through their accomplishments the eternality of struggle. These disappear too, eventually, just as those who made no effort, who were content merely to live and to enjoy. — Henry Miller

In other words, Hitler's soul life was not mature enough at that moment to maintain an awareness of himself and his surroundings when this alien entity entered him. During the following six months during a series of irregular meetings and discussions with Hitler, Walter Stein was to witness a maturing soul development in this enigmatic character through which he became more and more a conscious and responsive tool of the world-shattering purposes of the demonic Spirit which overshadowed him. 'I move like a sleep-walker where Providence dictates,' said Adolf Hitler at a press interview. — Trevor Ravenscroft

Life has its enigmatic events, that can make it a mystery, or my misery. It all depends on how I view it. — Anthony Liccione

An examined life, an enigmatic investigation of reality, is required in order for a person to realize a transcendent spiritual journey. A contemplative soul is bound to live life more intensely than someone whom is concerned exclusively with living an external existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn't care to sit next to in a train, people that don't exist, places you've never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader's creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive. — Ben Okri

Herschel Grynszpan's life was enigmatic, elusive and tragic. The traces he left on the historical record are just sufficient to tantalize and baffle historians. Harlan Greene has woven from these threads a riveting novel, erotic, haunting, and profoundly moving. — Janette Turner Hospital

Art translates human souls. Each passing eon's public display of sophisticated hieroglyphics cast a unique depiction upon the rudimentary art of survival. Humankind cannot exist without the makeshift paradigm of innovative art, which genuine amoeba expresses elusive and unsayable thoughts. Humankind's gallery of artistic impressions ranges from the starkness of personified cave drawings to the free ranging lexis of modern art. Collection of multihued stories of the ages portrays the vivid panoply of enigmatic vitas etched by humankind's self-imposed sense of urgency. Each passing generation's effusion of trope offerings seamlessly folds its shared renderings into the shimmering panorama of the cosmos, the sparkling nightscape that houses the intangible life force all communal souls. — Kilroy J. Oldster