Mystery

Famous quotes containing the word mystery:

    Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth
    Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see
    In simple childhood something of the base
    On which thy greatness stands; but this I feel,
    That from thyself it comes, that thou must give,
    Else never canst receive. The days gone by
    Return upon me almost from the dawn
    Of life: the hiding-places of man’s power
    Open; I would approach them, but they close.
    William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

    Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it’s intimate and psychological—resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
    Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)

    There is no mystery in a looking glass until someone looks into it. Then, though it remains the same glass, it presents a different face to each man who holds it in front of him. The same is true of a work of art. It has no proper existence as art until someone is reflected in it—and no two will ever be reflected in the same way. However much we all see in common in such a work, at the center we behold a fragment of our own soul, and the greater the art the greater the fragment.
    Harold C. Goddard (1878–1950)