Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on mystery.

“Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.” – Neil Armstrong

“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.” ― Anaïs Nin

“As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.” – Albert Schweitzer

“Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.” – Ray Bradbury

“Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?” – Charles de Lint

“I’m for mystery, not interpretive answers. … The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.” – Ken Kesey

“Mystery is a resource, like coal or gold, and its preservation is a fine thing.” – Tim Cahill

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead — his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.” ― Albert Einstein

“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.” ― Richard P. Feynman

“The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” ― Carl Sagan

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” ― Max Planck

“One (practitioner of science) is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snail’s eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ.” – Loren Eiseley

“Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.” – Rachel Carson

“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” ― Henry David Thoreau

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” ― Cormac McCarthy

“There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.” – Herman Melville

“The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.” – G. K. Chesterton

“The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” – Eden Phillpotts

“I am a great admirer of mystery and magic. Look at this life – all mystery and magic.” – Harry Houdini

“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.” – Rachel Louise Carson

“Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.” – Julia Cameron

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil.” ― Edgar Allan Poe

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” – Francis Bacon

“When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.” – Agnes Martin

“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.” – Rene Magritte

“Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It often seems to me that’s all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and beginning again. Yes, it is very true, that. And it is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory. If one little fact will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant.” ― Agatha Christie,

“As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.” ― Arthur Conan Doyle

“Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don’t even know it.” ― Sue Monk Kidd

“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” – Carl Gustav Jung

“Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don’t have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don’t deny anything, I don’t advocate anything, I just live with it.” – Bruce Springsteen

“Life consists in penetrating the unknown, and fashioning our actions in accord with the new knowledge thus acquired.” – Leo Tolstoy

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” – Charles Dickens

“For me, time is the greatest mystery of all. The fact is that we’re dreaming all the time. That’s what really gets me. We have a fathomless lake of unconsciousness just beneath our skulls.” – Anthony Hopkins

“Each person is an enigma. You’re a puzzle not only to yourself but also to everyone else, and the great mystery of our time is how we penetrate this puzzle.” – Theodore Zeldin

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” – Charles Dickens

“The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness” – Andre Malraux

“It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.” ― Thomas Moore

“The final mystery is oneself.” – Oscar Wilde

“The greatest mystery of existence is existence itself.” – Deepak Chopra

“It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.” – Diane Ackerman

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