I want to be with those who know secret things / or else alone.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Speak to me of things the world has yet to truly understand, of the instant meaning of each bird’s call, of a child’s secret thoughts in her mother’s womb, of the measured rhythmical time of every man and woman’s breath, of the true colors of the inside of the moon, of the larger miracles in small things, the deeper mysteries.
No two people see the external world in exactly the same way. To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is—in other words, not a thing, but a think.
All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets / unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.
That the universe appears accidental and predestined at the same time is not so much a measure of the qualities of the universe, but of the limitation of the perceptive system applied to it.
What egotism, what stupid vanity, to suppose that a thing could not happen because you could not conceive it!
The fellow who thinks he knows it all is especially annoying to those of us who do.
Holding to the old faith that everything is in principle knowable or comprehensible by us is a little like assuming that every human structure or artifact must be based on yards, feet, and inches. The notion that the universe is constructed, or we are evolved, so that reality must finally answer in every case to the questions we bring to it, is entirely as anthropocentric as the notion that the universe was designed to make us possible.
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Reality has changed chameleonlike before my eyes so many times, that I have learned, or am learning, to trust almost anything except what appears to be so.
The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in a balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
The condition of mankind is to be weary of what we do know and afraid of what we do not.
Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?
If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed. I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination.
Oh, give me a mystery, some simple mystery, / a secret mystery—silence and timidity— / a fragile mystery, a barefoot mystery . . . / just one sweet secret mystery!
There was magic in the world, pure and simple, things she didn’t understand. Best get used to it.
