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1 " There’s faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there’s faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they’re not entirely certain they’re in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God’s mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence. "
― R. Scott Bakker , The Darkness That Comes Before (The Prince of Nothing, #1)
2 " To attempt to describe how music pervades and flavors a life feels a little like an invasion of privacy, even if the privacy is my own. Listening to music,...is finally the most inward of acts--so inward that even language, even the language of thought, can come to seem intrusive...After all these procedures the unbreachable mysteriousness of music remains intact. The book can never be more than an interruption. Afterward, the listening begins again, to generate, in turn, other and completely different books. "
― , Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears
3 " We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the unknown and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright lights and knives are deterred by a holy and superstitious fear. Respect for the unknown is the attitude of those who, instead of raping nature, woo her until she gives herself. But what she gives, even then, is not the cold clarity of the surface but the warm inwardness of the body - a mysteriousness which is not merely a negation, a blank absence of knowledge, but that positive substance which we call wonderfull. "
― Alan W. Watts , Nature, Man and Woman
4 " Hamlet' dwarfs 'Hamilton' - it dwarfs pretty much everything - but there's a revealing similarity between them. Shakespeare's longest play leaves its audience in the dark about some basic and seemingly crucial facts. It's not as if the Bard forgot, in the course of all those words, to tell us whether Hamlet was crazy or only pretending: He wanted us to wonder. He forces us to work on a puzzle that has no definite answer. And this mysteriousness is one reason why we find the play irresistible. 'Hamilton' is riddled with question marks. The first act begins with a question, and so does the second. The entire relationship between Hamilton and Burr is based on a mutual and explicit lack of comprehension: 'I will never understand you,' says Hamilton, and Burr wonders, 'What it is like in his shoes?' Again and again, Lin distinguishes characters by what they wish they knew. 'What'd I miss?' asks Jefferson in the song that introduces him. 'Would that be enough?' asks Eliza in the song that defines her. 'Why do you write like you're running out of time?' asks everybody in a song that marvels at Hamilton's drive, and all but declares that there's no way to explain it. 'Hamilton', like 'Hamlet', gives an audience the chance to watch a bunch of conspicuously intelligent and well-spoken characters fill the stage with 'words, words, words,' only to discover, again and again, the limits to what they can comprehend. "
5 " The mysteriousness and mystique of space is such, that science fiction attempts to tantalize you by telling you a story that could possibly be out there and that's the appeal of science fiction. "
