Mystery man

“ As to the mysteries of revelation and inspiration, why, I meet mysteries, turn which way I will. Man, earth, time, eternity, God, are all inscrutable mysteries My own soul is a mystery unto itself, and so long as I am impotent to fathom its depths, how shall I hope to unfold the secrets of the universe? ”

“ Ay, sir, a mystery.
POMPEY.
Painting, sir, I have heard say, is a mystery; and your whores, sir, being members of my occupation, using painting, do prove my occupation a mystery. But what mystery there should be in hanging, if I should be hanged, I cannot imagine.
ABHORSON.
Sir, it is a mystery.
POMPEY.
Proof.
ABHORSON.
Every true man’s apparel fits your thief. If it be too little for your thief, your true man thinks it big enough; if it be too big for your thief, your thief thinks it little enough. ”

“ It is the great mystery of mysteries, darkly hinted in types, faintly gleaming in analogies, softly whispered in hopes, passionately asked in desires, patiently confirmed in arguments, suddenly blazed and thundered in revelation. Man from the very beginning of his race on earth has been thickly encompassed by mysteries, hung around by the muffling curtains of ignorance and superstition. ”

“ Sir," with calm energy, "man came into this world, not to sit down and muse, not to befog himself with vain subtleties, but to gird up his loins and to work. Mystery is in the morning, and mystery in the night, and the beauty of mystery is everywhere ”

“ No intellectual life when man is surrounded by mystery and miracle! When the mysterious forces which bring to birth and life are yet undiscovered; when the earth is teeming with life, and the dumb brown lips of the ridges are breathing mystery! ”

“ When that is explored, there are new and wonderful possibilities beyond the hills, then beyond the seas, beyond the known world, in the everyday chances and movements of the unknown life in which we are circumstanced. [292]
“Surely we should all perish through sheer inanity, or die desperately by suicide if no mystery remained in the world. Mystery takes a thousand beautiful shapes; it lurks even in the handiwork of man, in a stone god, or in some mighty, intricate machine, incomprehensibly deliberate and determined. ”

“ Believe me, Hester, there are few things,—whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought,—few things hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery. ”

“ You have heard that the Great Mystery is everywhere. He is in the earth and the water, heat and cold, rocks and trees, sun and sky; and He is also in us. When the spirit departs, that too is a mystery, and therefore we do not speak aloud the name of the dead. There are wonders all about us, and within, but if we are quiet and obedient to the voice of the spirit, sometime we may understand these mysteries! ”

“ And therefore, too, no matter how plain the face of the one man who was master of millions may have been, it bore always the imprint of enigmatic and awe-inspiring mystery. So the face of the dead always seems mysterious and significant, for through the familiar and well known features one gazes upon death, the mysterious and powerful. ”

“ What more lurid than the depths of desire, what more mysterious than the hinterlands of conscience? And what event is so great a mystery as life itself? I believe that every tale should be a mystery tale. ”

“ He dropped into silence, puzzled and in a way awed by the mystery enveloping her—a mystery of aloofness and stoniness, of complete separation from the contact of the world—the mystery that incloses all whose real life is lived deep within themselves. ”

“ Novelty has a perennial charm. Careful study of a subject is often necessary to reveal the novel and extraordinary phase of it that can best be emphasized.
Mysteries. The fascination for the human mind of whatever baffles it is so well known that it scarcely needs elaboration. Mysteries, whether real or fictitious, pique curiosity. Even the scholar and the practical man of affairs find relaxation in the mystery of the detective story. Real life often furnishes events sufficiently mysterious to make a special feature story that rivals fiction. ”

“ I ask you: where has the mystery been hiding all these years?"
"That is a question I shall not try to answer, Mr. Rhodes. It is my belief. however, that the mystery has never been hiding,—using the word, that is, in its literal signification." ”

“ THE CHURCHYARD.
As the world has ever been governed by mysteries—by mysteries amazed—by mysteries amused—by mysteries excited, subdued, and kept in awe—he, who could be, by his hopes of immortality, prompted to grapple with, to open, and to spread completely out, the philosophy of mystery, would be, beyond all dispute, hailed by the mysterious as a benefactor to his species. ”

“ It was a mystery, a portent, a premonition such as overtakes a man sometimes in the dark passageways of life. I cannot tell you of it, nor make you believe—let it pass——
Then by a slow process of successive perceptions I
Slowly the man defined himself as a shape takes form in a fog
became aware that I was watched by other eyes, other wax figures, other human beings with unwavering gaze. ”

“ As for the faithful adherents of the unknown, who had long understood that we must resign ourselves to understanding nothing and he prepared for every sort of surprise there was here, all the same, even for them, a mystery of another character, a bewildering mystery, the only really strange mystery, more torturing than all the others together, because it verges upon ancestral fears and touches the most sensitive point of our destiny. ”

“ Guards at the citadel refused to allow me to visit John.
Written requests go unanswered.
Peter, James and Matthew are no luckier than I.
ÿ
A finch is watching me as I write under the olives.
Rain is threatening.
Conception. Birth. Death. Each is a mystery.
In my father’s house I grew up among mysteries. I heard them talked, argued over, curtly dismissed. I have resented the unknowns, yet to plumb them is still beyond me. Each child is a mystery. The temple is a mystery. The shell that I pick up on the beach has its mystery. Some say I am a man of mysteries. Does the turtle have its mysteries? ”

“ Albeit, in those orbs to which the demons of my rank have admission, there be greater adumbrations of some transcendent Mystery than here, yet have I never seen that Mystery itself, and know not if it be male or female. Aeons ago, when I was young and incautious, when the world was new and bright, and there were more stars than now, I, too was attracted by this Mystery, and sought after it in all accessible spheres. But failing to find the thing itself, I soon grew weary of embracing its shadows, and took to the pursuit of illusions less insubstantial. ”

“ Ah! It walks in a great wide circle and will not come near the great man. Mystery! Mystery! They are afraid of his wisdom. It will strike them dead, like lightning. So they send their children to him. ”

“ In other words, "mystery," which we derive from the Greek word quoted, means neither more nor less than a secret revealed and explained to us. A man of mature years and finished education knows that which no school-boy can comprehend. To the elder a secret has been revealed. He is in possession of the mystery. To the younger it is yet a secret, not incomprehensible, but which can only be attained in the progress of learning. ”

“ Those are just a few of the questions you will ask yourself, as you rush through this baffling tale of mystery piled upon mystery. It's a breathless book—a story in which action never ceases for a moment, and whose outcome you never suspect until the last big moment of struggle when mystery ceases to be mystery, and you breathe the contented sigh that comes at the end of a good story well told—and thoroughly enjoyed. ”

“ They stood still to listen. A mystery that was more than the mystery of night closed about their hearts—a mystery that is beyond life and death, that only great awe and terror can summon from the deeps of the soul. ”

“ And let the whole world’s gladness be complete.{126}
Come with the face that hushed the heavens of old—
Come with Thy maidens in a mist of light;
Haste for the night falls and the shadows fold,
And voices cry and wander on the height.
{127} The Flying Mist
I watch afar the moving Mystery,
The wool-shod, formless terror of the sea—
The Mystery whose lightest touch can change
The world God made to phantasy, death-strange.
Under its spell all things grow old and gray
As they will be beyond the Judgment Day. ”

“ Mystery is not young, not pretty, though still of an average candle-light passability; but she does such miracles in her own behalf, that, one of these days, when she dies, they'll be amazed to find an old woman in her bed, distantly like her. She was an actress once, I shouldn't wonder, and had a Mystery attendant on herself. Perhaps, Compact Enchantress will live to be a Mystery, and to wait with a shawl at the side-scenes, and to sit opposite to Mademoiselle in railway carriages, and smile and talk subserviently, as Mystery does now. ”

“ There the skies are bright, the trees are always green. There the golden sandhills stretch away, the palm trees wave, the Nile sweeps majestic. There the cold winds scarcely ever blow, and the people's hearts are warm."
"I suppose so."
"There are mysteries there, as in Temple Hall, Mr. Blake; but mysteries are sometimes of human origin." ”

“ But it has occurred to me that you may have the conceit of your own mystery, that you may take rather too much pleasure in mystifying people as to your identity."
"That is unkind,—that is unkind," and he spoke without resentment, but softly, with a falling cadence. ”

“ An insatiable thirst for the marvellous seems to be incident to the human mind, in all states and conditions of society. Man lives in the midst of mystery;—if he looks back, or forward, or around him, he is constantly lost in wonder and amazement ”

“ I went to school in France and Germany, as well as in England, and, do you know, I really cannot find one bit of romance that has ever happened to me or to the girls I have known. I can't remember anything mysterious."
"Isn't life one great mystery?"
"Yes, mystery if you like, but simply because of our ignorance. When the mystery is explained, the explanation is as prosy as that cottage." And she looked towards a cottage door, where a woman stood by her wash-tub. "Do you ever find life mysterious, Mr. Erskine?" ”

“ For though to you, for instance, it may seem impossible to worship Mystery with one lobe of the brain, and with the other to explain it, the thought that this may not seem impossible to others should not discourage you; it is but another little piece of that Mystery which makes life so wonderful and sweet. ”

“ But mystery continued to have its way with me. If I asked direct questions of the religious about the unknowable, I was told it was a mystery, a fact I already knew all too well. Directness, simplicity, sincerity, were losing ground. By no wish of my own I was being bound over to the majority of these people who it must be, by every assumption of their own and others, were my betters. They did not choose to use plain language. They spoke for the most part in riddles worse even than the bewildering bat. They made it approximately clear that mystery was a virtue. ”

“ That it is a branch of that mystery of mysteries, la névrose, I have no manner of doubt, for I have seen it in all its forms—a malignant growth which makes night of the lives it plays upon; and flourishes to exceeding profit down in the very heart of tragedies. ”

“ If a mystery was possible of solution, I believed that he would solve it, so it was to the Record I turned now, and read carefully every word he wrote about the tragedy.
It is difficult for me to explain, even to myself, the interest with which I followed the case. I suppose most of us have a fondness, more or less unrealised, for the unique and mysterious, and we all of us revolt sometimes against the commonplaceness of every-day existence. ”

“ Mystery is essential to a plot, and cannot be appreciated without intelligence. To the curious it is just another "and then——" To appreciate a mystery, part of the mind must be left behind, brooding, while the other part goes marching on. ”

“ What is it all about, and what does everybody mean by holding conversations behind our backs, and saying things we mustn't hear, while we're expected to sit mum-chance on our chairs, eating our hearts away? Because we're women, I suppose, and aren't fit to be trusted! Mystery, mystery, mystery, nothing but mystery, and we're to hold our tongues. I wouldn't have believed it of you, Dick. Do you mean to tell me that this little matter of business, and this voyage of discovery, as you call it, doesn't concern us? ”

“ Could one lift the impenetrable veil of mystery that hides the future from our curious eyes, what secrets would often be revealed, what shadows would fall upon hearts now light and thoughtless—shadows of grief, of horror, and despair! ”

“ In them, alone, before he had strength and skill to build nobly for himself, could man find darkness, the mother of mystery and awe, in which he is reminded perforce of his own ignorance and weakness; in which he learns first to remember unseen powers, sometimes to his comfort and elevation, sometimes only to his terror and debasement ”

“ "To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man,—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become—this. ”