Life's Mysteries Quotes & Sayings

Through scientific discovery and technological innovation, we enlist the forces of the natural world to solve many of the uniquely human problems we face - feeding and providing energy to agrowing population, improving human health, taking responsibility for protecting the environment and the global ecosystem, and ensuring our own Nation's security. Scientific discoveries inspire and enrich us, teaching us about the mysteries of life and the nature of the world. — William J. Clinton

On No Work of Words
On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody
Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:
To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given
Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,
The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.
To lift to leave from the treasures of man is pleasing death
That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath
And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.
To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas
If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work. — Dylan Thomas

But so went forth Darnell, day by day, strangely mistaking death for life, madness for sanity, and purposeless and wandering phantoms for true beings. He was sincerely of opinion that he was a City clerk, living in Shephard's Bush
having forgotten the mysteries and the far-shining glories of the kingdom which was his by legitimate inheritance. — Arthur Machen

each day's life comes with lot of puzzles, mysteries to unravel; being so conscious of life can make one so unconscious of life — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Life is magical, there are always mysteries you won't understand, like the one that happened today. I guess that's what makes it exciting, the fact that you never know what to expect on this journey. No matter how dim the lights of life look, it can always get brighter. That's why I'm going to keep on going. Who knows? Maybe my life will magically turn back to the way it used to be. Or maybe it'll turn out even better. But I can't find any of that out unless I am strong. Strong I will be, looking on the bright side whenever possible, sailing my ship through the waters, no matter how stormy they will be. I will be brave. Always. — Chloe Gadsby-Jones

To be reminded of life's mysteries was a delicious gift. — Lynn Thomson

He was conscious - and the thought brought a gleam of pleasure into his brown agate eyes - that it was through certain words of his, musical words said with musical utterance, that Dorian Gray's soul had turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her. To a large extent the lad was his own creation. He had made him premature. That was something. Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. But now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting. — Oscar Wilde

(Answers to life) - You don't have to have it all figured out by a certain age or time in your life. It will come in bits and pieces along the way. — Lindsey Rietzsch

Charles's conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone's ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris. He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come across in a novel.
A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him. — Gustave Flaubert

So often we focus on finding answers to life's mysteries ...
when in reality, a wiser approach is to start asking better questions, and more of them. — Dana Gore

But the final price of freedom is the willingness to face that most frightening of all beings, one's own self. Starlight vision, the "other way of knowing," is the mode of perception of the unconscious, rather than the conscious mind. The depths of our own beings are not all sunlit; to see clearly, we must be willing to dive into the dark, inner abyss and acknowledge the creatures we may find there. For, as Jungian analyst M. Esther Harding explains in Woman's Mysteries, "These subjective factors ... are potent psychical entities, they belong to the totality of our being, they cannot be destroyed. So long as they are unrecognized outcasts from our conscious life, they will come between us and all the objects we view, and our whole world will be either distorted or illuminated. — Starhawk

Understand life's mysteries - as mysteries to be lived. — Robert Zemeckis

the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's, or a celebrated figure's, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information. Often — Rebecca Solnit

I feel sad for the people who I hear always plan, plan, plan the next day's event to occur. Life only stands still for them. — Ingrid Nkenlifack

Love sees ten million fathoms down, till dazzled by the floor of pearls. The eye is Love's own magic glass, where all things that are not of earth, glide in supernatural light. There are not so many fishes in the sea, as there are sweet images in lovers' eyes. In those miraculous translucencies swim the strange eye-fish with wings, that sometimes leap out, instinct with joy; moist fish-wings wet the lover's cheek. Love's eyes are holy things; therein the mysteries of life are lodged; looking in each other's eyes, lovers see the ultimate secret of the worlds; and with thrills eternally untranslatable, feel that Love is god of all. Man or woman who has never loved, nor once looked deep down into their own lover's eyes, they know not the sweetest and the loftiest religion of this earth. Love is both Creator's and Saviour's gospel to mankind; a volume bound in rose-leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with peach-juice on the leaves of lilies. — Herman Melville

You journalists bulldoze life's mysteries, ignorant of what you're so ruthlessly turning up. — Marisha Pessl

Motivation is a mystery.Why does one salesperson see his first prospect at seven in the morning and another salesperson is just getting out of bed at eleven?I don't know.It's part of the mysteries of life. — Jim Rohn

We don't have to have all the answers and know everything. Life is about acknowledging the unknown and just living. — Raneem Kayyali

That's the essence of our faith. It's living with hope in the face of mystery. We live a life of faith completely full of hope, staring mystery right in the face. You can't have one without the other. Your faith won't survive without hope, and hope won't survive without the realization that there are mysteries that will not be answered. If you can embrace both, you can have a vibrant faith. — Kay Warren

It's and odd thing, but however much an oficionado one may be of mysteries in book form, when they pop up in real life they seldom fail to give one the pip. — P.G. Wodehouse

Can I interest you in a dinner cupcake?" "A dinner cupcake?" he scoffs. "Yes, I accidentally bought five." No one needs to know about the cupcake I've already inhaled. "How does one accidently buy five cupcakes?" His eyes sparkle with amusement. "Don't know." I shrug. "Chalk it up to one of life's many mysteries." "So the cupcakes replace dinner?" "Yes, they cover all the important food groups. Eggs for protein, milk for dairy, flour for the starch." "What about a vegetable?" "I'm sure there's vegetable shortening in the batter or the frosting. — A.C. Netzel

I guess it's just another one of life's little mysteries."
"I'm tired of mysteries."
"Yeah? I think they add a kind of zest to the world. Like salt in a stew. — Neil Gaiman

Perhaps terror and peace became the same thing when life's mysteries were unveiled. In the Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna reveals his divine form at Arjuna's request, Arjuna is terrified at seeing what no mortal can stand to see. But the end to human doubt surely must also bring with it a definite, final peace. — Padma Viswanathan

In so many ways, the same impulse to know the world and our place in it is at the roots of both science and spirituality. Both are attempts to illuminate the mysteries of our world and expand our vision of the greater whole. By charting the history of science, I hope these pages have shown how vital and awesome real science is. Throughout history, scientific discovery has brought us closer to the wonders of life and the universe - and immeasurably deepened our appreciation for creation. It engages the world and inspires the best in us. But the pursuit of truth should not be driven by zealous agenda. Nor should it overreach and speak with righteous authority where it's on unsolid ground. That's not science - and let's not allow those who falsely invoke its name to diminish us. — Amir D. Aczel

Darwin's Theory of Evolution is the worst way to explain the mysteries of life, except for Creationism. — Roberto Quaglia

The anguish of death hangs over and leads the human spirit to wonder about the mysteries of existence, man's destiny, life, the world. — Edgar Morin

The Lord commands us to learn and discover all we can in this life. There's nothing wrong with wanting to know the mysteries of outer space or the latent powers of the mind. The problem comes when we desire to use that knowledge for our own gratification, rather than to build the kingdom of God. — Chris Heimerdinger

Because who knows? Who knows anything? Who knows who's pulling the strings? Or what is? Or how? Who knows if destiny is just how you tell yourself the story of your life? Another son might not have heard his mother's last words as a prophecy but as drug-induced gibberish, forgotten soon after. Another girl might not have told herself a love story about a drawing her brother made. Who knows if Grandma really thought the first daffodils of spring were lucky or if she just wanted to go on walks with me through the woods? Who knows if she even believed in her bible at all or if she just preferred a world where hope and creativity and faith trump reason? who knows if there are ghosts (sorry, Grandma) or just the living, breathing memories of your loved ones, inside you, speaking to you, trying to get your attention by any means necessary? Who knows where the hell Ralph is? (Sorry, Oscar.) No one knows.
SO we grapple with the mysteries, each in our own way. — Jandy Nelson

One of life's mysteries is why two children growing up in the same home sometimes take radically different paths - one following Christ, the other rebellious and scornful. Yet it happens. — Billy Graham

I consider fantasy the heir of mythology, addressing a real human need to seek out answers to life's many mysteries. It is a genre that can tell an entertaining and enthralling story on the surface, and yet deliver a potent message underneath, where everything becomes a symbol of something greater. — Dean F. Wilson

We find a model for learning how to live in stories about heroism. The heroic quest is about saying yes to yourself and, in so doing, becoming more fully alive and more effective in the world. For the hero's journey is first about taking a journey to find the treasure of your true self, and then about returning home to give your gift to help transform the kingdom- and, in the process, your own life. The quest itself is replete with dangers and pitfalls, but if offers great rewards: the capacity to be successful in the world, knowledge of the mysteries of the human soul, the opportunity to find and express your unique gifts in the world, and to live in loving community with other people. — Carol S. Pearson

Tell me about your life since I last saw you." | "There are no great mysteries to tell. My path is always ther, and I do everything I can to follow it in a dignified way." | "What is your path?" | "The path of someone seeking love." | "And love's path is really complicated." | "Because on that path we can go either to heaven or to hell? — Paulo Coelho

You can approach 'The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death' in a variety or combination of ways: as a startlingly eccentric hobby; as a series of unresolved murder mysteries; as the manifestation of one woman's peculiar psychic life; as a lesson in forensics; as a metaphor for the fate of women; as a photographic study. — Robert Gottlieb

Life was a swirl of mysteries, each one waiting to be plucked up and explored, but not necessarily solved. As the weight of responsibility bore down on a person, it could feel like a long list of chores leading up to the final one - figuring out how to die with dignity. But Quincy's interpretation of his surroundings seemed a truer representation of life's meaning, or rather, the lack of meaning other than to dazzle and delight and befuddle from cradle to grave. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

In a world where the most consequential things happen by chance, or from unfathomable causes, you don't look to reason for help. You consort with mysteries ... They have been killed in place of you - in your place. You don't think it out, not at the time, not in those terms, but you can't help but feel it, and go on feeling it. It's the close call you have to keep escaping from, the unending doubt that you have a right to your own life. It's the corruption suffered by everyone who lives on, that henceforth they must wonder at the reason and probe its justice. — Tobias Wolff

I realize that adults are just as fucked as the rest of us. No one really grows up. No one unravels all of life's many mysteries. They just grow older and become better liars. — Shaun David Hutchinson

Why not let people differ about their answers to the great mysteries of the Universe? Let each seek one's own way to the highest, to one's own sense of supreme loyalty in life, one's ideal of life. Let each philosophy, each world-view bring forth its truth and beauty to a larger perspective, that people may grow in vision, stature and dedication. — Algernon Black

It is the narrow, hidden tracks that lead back to our lost homeland, what contains the solution to the last mysteries is not the ugly scar that life's rasp leaves on us, but the fine, almost invisible writing that is engraved on our body. — Gustav Meyrink

That morning I realized I would probably spend the rest of my professional life trying to unravel the mysteries of trauma. How do horrific experiences cause people to become hopelessly stuck in the past? What happens in people's minds and brains that keeps them frozen, trapped in a place they desperately wish to escape? Why — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

All that crap about love and fairness and doing something with your life, Bruno ... Those are luxury problems. The CEO's wife can go around worrying about that stuff. People like us from the projects have to play by a different set of rules."

George Hanson
In The Shadow of Sadd — Steen Langstrup

I write to raise the curtain on life's endless possibilities. Because you asked, Pourquoi? — Peggy Kopman-Owens

Most people live lives that are full of mysteries, lives whose ultimate purpose we may never really understand. But for the sake of serenity, we must believe in life's nobleness. — Janvier Chouteu-Chando

She is twin-born with primal mysteries, and drinks of life at Time's forgotten source. — Sarojini Naidu

Never does a star grace this land with a poet's light of twinkling mysteries, nor does the sun send to here its rays of warmth and life. — R.A. Salvatore

O, great wise man,' she said, 'I have been wondering so many things. Is life more than sitting at home doing the same thing over and over? Wise man, is life more than watching one's relatives do unpleasant things, or more than grim tasks one must perform at school and at work? Is life more than being entertained by literature, wise man, or more than traveling from one place to another, suffering from poor emotional health and pondering the people one loves? And what about those who lead a life of mystery? And the mysteries of life? And, wise man, what about the overall feeling of doom that one cannot ever escape no matter what one does, and miscellaneous things that I have neglected to mention in specific? — Lemony Snicket

Never be afraid to bring the transcendent mysteries of our faith, Christ's life and death and resurrection, to the help of the humblest and commonest of human wants. — Phillips Brooks

There can be no more reliable authority on earth than God's Word, the Bible. This timeless, trustworthy source of truth holds the key that unlocks life's mysteries. It alone provides us with the shelter we need in times of storm. — Charles R. Swindoll

And as they stood in silence before her, prayed again. "Nothing is altered and in spite of God's mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life." Indeed there was not, nor was this what he'd meant to convey. "Please let Yvonne have her dream
dream?
of a new life with me
please let me believe that all that is not an abominable self-deception," he tried ... "Please let me make her happy, deliver me from this dreadful tyranny of self. I have sunk low. Let me sink lower still, that I may know the truth. Teach me to love again, to love life." That wouldn't do either ... "Where is love? Let me truly suffer. Give me back my purity, the knowledge of the Mysteries, that I have betrayed and lost.
Let me be truly lonely, that I may honestly pray. Let us be happy again somewhere, if it's only together, if it's only out of this terrible world. Destroy the world!" he cried in his heart. — Malcolm Lowry

Let some things remain mysterious. — H. Jackson Brown Jr.

So you should be grateful about most everything, because, being an American, you live a very privileged life. There's just a tiny amount of room for complaining, because there are a few legitimate things worth complaining about. Like, let's say you watched a show about people who crashed on an island, and it was full of interesting mysteries, and you kept watching for six seasons, hoping to find answers to all the mysteries - but then in the finale they totally didn't answer anything and acted like it was the characters and their resolutions I was supposed to care about - like Jack's constant whining should have been my focus rather than the smoke monster or the mysterious hatch. That's awful. That's worth complaining about . . . even years later. — Frank J. Fleming

I've been washing stairs my whole life. One day after the other. Since I was five years old. I've never complained. Shame on you. I'm embarrassed to have a son like you ... can't even look after his own bicycle. You just wait until your dad comes home. Then you'll be in trouble, I can tell you that much.
Poul-Erik's Mother
The Informer — Steen Langstrup

The defining line from Frank Herbert's Dune argues that the mystery of life "is not a question to be answered but a reality to be experienced." My fantasy offers the opposite. Nothing would be experienced. Nothing would feel new or unknown or jarring. It's a fantasy for people who want to solve life's mysteries without having to do the work. — Chuck Klosterman

It had always been a part of his job which he found difficult, the total lack of privacy for the victim. Murder stripped away more than life itself. The body was parceled, labelled, dissected; address books, diaries, confidential letters, every part of the victim's life was sought out and scrutinized. Alien hands moved among the clothes, picked up and examined the small possessions, recorded and labelled for public view the sad detritus of sometimes pathetic lives. — P.D. James

When you get older, you know that life's mysteries are revealed in the fullness of time. All you have to do is wait, watch, and be amazed. — Linda Gray

There's never any closure in an awe-inspired life, only constant acceptance of the mysteries of life. — Oliver Burkeman

It's fitting, then, that we begin this exploration of ourselves and of the world with music, and more specifically with a musical quality called vibrato. This pulsation that wells up within the sounded note can lead us to what is most spontaneous and creative in human life, and possibly even to deeper mysteries
to powers of knowing and doing which we have lost or given away during the epoch of civilization, and which perhaps we may now regain. — George Leonard

The finest SF comes to grips with life's mysteries, with our resentments against our own natures and our limited societies. It does so by asking basic questions in the artful, liberating way that is unique to this form of writing. Echoes of it are found in other forms of fiction - in the novel of ideas, in the historical novel, in the writings of the great philosophers and scientists; but the best SF does this all more searchingly, by taking what is in most people only a moment of wonder and rebellion against the arbitrariness of existence and making of it an art enriched by knowledge and possibility, expressing our deepest human longing to penetrate into the dark heart of the unknown. — George Zebrowski

He had always thought there was an answer to all life's mysteries in the stars, yet whenever he stared at them the answer slipped out of his grasp ... But he had to think now, and he stared at the smoke-dimmed stars in the hope that they would help him, but all they did was go on shining. — Bernard Cornwell

I'd love to be [one of MacGyver's buddies]. I'd watch that one and just think, wow, what a life. Living in Hawaii, driving around in someone's Ferrari, and solving mysteries. — Rhys Darby

The goal of the artist is not to resolve life's mysteries, but to deepen them. — Jerry Uelsmann

calendar.We insert the mysteries of Christ's life into the seasons and the times of the year, beginning with Advent and carry on to Pentecost, from November to June approximately. This allows us to live these mysteries in ways which give access to the full reality of resurrection. Christianity is not a new religion, it is a new form of existence. It is the introduction of the dimension of resurrection into the spatio-temporal continuum of ordinary daily life. — Monks Of Glenstal Abbey

School was more than academics; an education prepared you for the humdrum of real life: working with others, tempering one's personality to assimilate with the group but without losing your individual identity, understading the factors of logic, reasoning, and debate. For a person - vampire or human - to succeed in the world, unlocking the mysteries of the universe was insufficient. One would also need to grasp the mysteries of human nature. — Melissa De La Cruz

I think books with spiritual themes simply point to the deeper mysteries of life - to what lies beyond us, to what's hidden inside of us, or perhaps to an understanding of what truly matters. — Sue Monk Kidd

The Catholic chruch as threatened your life - do you not want revenge? Have you not sold your hatred to the Pretestant cause to work against the church that has hunted you?"
"No," I said simply. "I hate no one. I want only to be left in peace to understand the mysteries of the universe in my own way."
"God has already laid out for us the mysteries of the universe, or as much as He permits us to understand. You think your way is better?"
"Better than these wars of dogma that have led men to burn and fillet one another across Europe for fifty years? Yes, I do."
"Then what is it you believe?"
I looked at him. "I believe that, in the end, even the devils will be pardoned. — S.J. Parris

Constellations shine with light that was emitted aeons ago, and I wait for something to come to me, words that a poet might use to illuminate life's mysteries. But there is nothing. — Nicholas Sparks

I will see great things when I am willing to be seen. I will receive new eyes that see the mysteries of GOd's own life, but only when I allow God to see me, all of me, even those parts that I myself do not want to see. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

It's an honor and privilege to be next to the great mysteries, and that's what I get to do every day. Why are we here? How beautiful the Earth is. Whatever it is, large and small. There's so much that's beautiful and moving and sad, to experience that and find shapes for it, to deeply enter that meditative space. There's nothing like it. Everything else seems so pale. — Carole Maso

What The Mysteries of Udolpho suggests is how a novel, by presenting phenomena before it present resolutions, can create an on-going, perhaps spurious, but nevertheless compelling dynamic between details which can undermine the ability of form to impose its particular tyranny on the reader's experience: there is a life in the novel which comes from within. — Ian Gregor

Outside there a lot of powerful stuff, starting from mind movies up to movies like drama, real life, horror, mysteries and many other. Music which makes your day interesting, quotes which change your thought, books which provoke and many other stuff... (So now you know what's everything about, Good Luck with the other Stuff!) — Deyth Banger

We laughed again. We couldn't stop. I wondered what it was we were laughing about. Was it just our names? Were we laughing because we were relieved? Were we happy? Laughter was another one of life's mysteries — Benjamin Alire Saenz

In The Bloudy Tenent, Williams points out that Constantine "did more to hurt Christ Jesus than the raging fury of the most bloody Neroes." at least under the Christian persecutor Nero, who was rumored to have had the Apostle Paul beheaded and Saint Peter crucified upside down, Christianity was a pure (if hazardous) way of life. But when Constantine himself converted to Christianity, that's when the Church was corrupted and perverted by the state. Williams explains that under Constantine, "the gardens of Christ's churches turned into the wildernesss of national religion, and the world (under Constantine's dominion) to the most unchristian Christendom." Legalizing, legitimizing the Church turned Christianity into just another branch of government enforced by "the sword of civil power," i.e., through state-sponsored violence. — Sarah Vowell

Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the past six months has persuaded him otherwise.
Has it? — Dan Simmons

Fishing provides time to think, and reason not to. If you have the virtue of patience, an hour or two of casting alone is plenty of time to review all you've learned about the grand themes of life. It's time enough to realize that every generalization stands opposed by a mosaic of exceptions, and that the biggest truths are few indeed. Meanwhile, you feel the wind shift and the temperature change. You might simply decide to be present, and observe a few facts about the drifting clouds ... Fishing in a place is a meditation on the rhythm of a tide, a season, the arc of a year, and the seasons of life ... I fish to scratch the surface of those mysteries, for nearness to the beautiful, and to reassure myself the world remains. I fish to wash off some of my grief for the peace we so squander. I fish to dip into that great and awesome pool of power that propels these epic migrations. I fish to feel- and steal- a little of that energy. — Carl Safina

He felt a touch of sadness now that it had happened, now that he knew what it was like. Not because it wasn't enjoyable, or wouldn't be repeated, but because one more of life's mysteries had been revealed. — Chad Harbach

Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious-that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment. — Dan Brown

Love was truly one of life's mysteries. That it could fuck you five ways to Sunday and still remain so utterly perplexing and unknown was kind of impressive. I guess it all depends on how you look at it. — Kylie Scott

Life and consciousness are the two great mysteries. Actually, their substrates are the inanimate. And how do you get from neurons shooting around in the brain to the thought that pops up in your head and mine? There's something deeply mysterious about that. And if you're not struck by the mystery, I think you haven't thought about it. — Charles Krauthammer

To see the beauties, mysteries and magics of your existence look at it with intense love, child's wonder and joyful heart. — Debasish Mridha

Too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's, or a celebrated figure's, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowning. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information. — Rebecca Solnit

Between birth and burial, we find ourselves in a comedy of mysteries. If you don't think life is mysterious, if you believe you have it all mapped out, you aren't paying attention or you've anesthetized yourself with booze or drugs, or with a comforting ideology. And if you don't think life's a comedy - well, friend, you might as well hurry along to that burial. The rest of us need people with whom we can laugh. — Dean Koontz

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries. — Iris Murdoch

It is a truth of human nature that we can ponder life's mysteries for only so long before we lose interest and move on to something else. — Sue Grafton

One of life's little mysteries is how a two-pound box of chocolate can make a person gain five pounds. M — Jill Shalvis

Altruism has always been one of biology's deep mysteries. Why should any animal, off on its own, specified and labeled by all sorts of signals as its individual self, choose to give up its life in aid of someone else? — Lewis Thomas

Quoting geneticists, Guy Murcia says we're all family. You have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is further removed than your fiftieth cousin. Murcia also describes out kinship though an analysis of how deeply we share the air. With each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and-owing to the wind's ceaseless circulation- over a year's time you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as well as everyone who ever lived. (The Seven Mysteries of Life) — Rob Brezsny

Maurice Blanche maintained that amid the tales, the smokescreens, and the deceptive mirrors of life's unsolved mysteries, truth resides, waiting for someone to enter its sanctum, then leave, without quite closing the door behind them. That is when truth may make its escape. — Jacqueline Winspear

But it gradually seemed to me that I'd made myself believe something that wasn't true. I'd made myself believe that I was fine and happy and fulfilled on my own without the love of anyone else. Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I'd spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn't matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit ... And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without feeling that again? I thought: I want to go to China. It's full of treasures and strangeness and mysteries and joy. — Philip Pullman

Rationale still remains the greatest impediment to encountering God's mysteries. — Christian Hunt

In our eagerness to solve life we start out to trace its mysteries and trample God's truths as we search. As we return we discover the shattered treasures, and gladly stoop to gather up the fragments, and with them translate the revelations of the soul. — Margaret Bird Steinmetz

One of life's most painful mysteries was that time moved on, with or without you. Those left behind loved and laughed and resumed living as if you'd never been at all. — Laura Frantz

How would you even begin to make a hush puppy, what in the world was in one? Nothing to do with a puppy, surely. Garnett had long known, though he didn't much like to admit it, that God's world and the better part of daily life were full of mysteries known only to women. — Barbara Kingsolver

Charles's conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, and everyone's ideas filed along it in their ordinary clothes, exciting no emotion, no laughter, no reverie. He had never been curious, he said, when he lived in Rouen, to go to the theater and see the actors from Paris. He did not know how to swim, or fence, or fire a pistol, and he could not explain to her, one day, a riding term she had come upon in a novel.

But shouldn't a man know everything, excel at a host of different activities, initiate you into the intensities of passion, the refinements of life, all its mysteries? Yet this man taught her nothing, knew nothing, wished for nothing. He thought she was happy; and she resented him for that settled calm, that ponderous serenity, that very happiness which she herself brought him. — Gustave Flaubert

As life goes on, they become not two compatible beings who have learned to live together through self-suppression and patience, but one new and richer being, fused in the fires of God's love and tempered of the best of both. One by one, the veils of life's mysteries have been lifted. The flesh, they found, was too precocious to reveal its own mystery; then came the mystery of the other's inner life, disclosed in the raising of young minds and hearts in the ways of God; — Fulton J. Sheen

When I was no longer of the world, I would miss its extravagant beauty. I would miss the complex and charming layers of subterfuge by which the truth of the world's mysteries were withheld from us even as we were tantalized and enchanted by them. I would miss the kindness of good people who were compassionate when so many were pitiless, who made their way through so much corruption without being corrupted themselves, who eschewed envy in a world of envy, who eschewed greed in a world of greed, who valued truth and could not be drowned in a sea of lies, for they shone and, by the light they cast, they had warmed me all my life. — Dean Koontz

If you know it... ... as conclusion there isn't a reason to continue... No mysteries no reasons. Life with it's own reasons! — Deyth Banger

I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn't have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. Dante's my friend. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

I thought about it and decided that I wasn't going to attempt to answer life's greater mysteries
especially given all I was dealing with presently
and so I figured it best to stick with the plan. — Matthew Quick

Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing different coloured shirts, how to feign injury, how to blow your snot onto the pitch - See, son, you press hard on one nostril to close it, and explode the green stuff out of the other. How to be vain and overpaid and have your best years behind you before you've even understood what life's about. Oh yes, I look forward to taking Lucas to the football. But — Julian Barnes

The real truth about a lot of life's mysteries can be explained by science but people don't want to get in bed with science because it's cold. They prefer religion, myth, drama. — David Duchovny

The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.
- "Old Man's Advice to Youth: 'Never Lose a Holy Curiosity.'" LIFE Magazine (2 May 1955) p. 64 — Albert Einstein