Unknown man

“ 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. ”

“ Tell me thy case; it may be God will give thee solace at my hands.” “O old man,” rejoined she, “if thou be a man of discretion, I will discover to thee my secret; but first tell me who thou art, that I may know whether thou art worthy of confidence or not; for the poet saith:
None keepeth secrets but the man who’s trusty and discreet: A secret’s ever safely placed with honest fold and leal;
For me, my secrets I preserve within a locked-up house, Whose key is lost and on whose door is set the Cadi’s seal.” ”

“ As long as you are pursuing the unknown, this movement is in operation. There is something that you can do that gives you the hope that maybe one day you will stumble into this experience of the unknown. How can the unknown ever become the known? ”

“ Is there a spot on earth where such a man is unknown, an ominous survival testifying to the eternal fitness of lies and impudence? ”

“ Now it would be exceedingly surprising if, acting and speaking in the name of the departed, they should be so consistently ignorant of the existence of those who inspire them; and more surprising still if the dead, whom in other circumstances we see so jealously vindicating their identity, should not here, when the occasion is so propitious, seek to declare themselves, to manifest themselves and to make themselves known. ”

“ All passionate seekers after undiscovered truth know that much mental toil, and probably years of wearisome watching, are demanded before any one can hope to snatch a new secret from the close keeping of the unknown. ”

“ Our future was so completely unknown, and I think that the unknown and the awful always bring a man nearer to his Maker. ”

“ But we have still to deal with the unknown in two more troublesome senses. It may stand for a mere possibility about which we know nothing further, and for entertaining which we can find no further ground. ”

“ Is it really knowing a thing, he asks, to class it with something else with which one is already familiar and so find it less strange?—this when both alike may be unknown, the things we are most familiar with being sometimes the least known, inasmuch as they excite no curiosity and we fancy we know them already. ”

“ I lavish tears and riches and soul and wit and life; For lavishness is profit in love, as well know I.
The foulest of all evils and woes that may betide Is when a man disfavour from fair ones must aby.
They say that to show favour’s forbidden to the fair And that their blood ’tis lawful to shed for love that sigh;
And so unto the lovesick, for all resource, remains His life for love to lavish, in jest, and jesting die.
I cry aloud, distracted with longing for my love; For all the lover’s effort is weeping and outcry. ”

“ What's the existence of man's life
But open war, or slumbered strife?
Where sicknes to his sense presents
The combat of the elements,
And never feeles a perfect peace,
Till Death's cold hand signs his release? ”

“ Friendship, the abstract of the world's chiefe joy!
Which once contracted nothing can destroy;
Whose first original, if true, doth rise
From purest love, and perfect sympathys.
The spring of soules, by which two equal move,
And one another's bliss and griefs do prove;
W hose different bodys but one heart admit,
And both have but one will to govern it.
From friendship we receave all that which can
Make living here supportable to man;
There is a secret in it does contain
A remedy or ease for every pain;
It never flys us when we're in distress,
Nor grows more courtly in our happiness. ”

“ We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own good reason. ”

“ Such persons, therefore, find every where a due sense of their claims already established, except among those who are ignorant of the world by virtue of their own obscurity; "Not to know them, argues one's self unknown." ”

“ Let it be the medium or myself that discovers the unknown personality in the object or tracks it across time and space: all that we do is to widen the scope of our riddle, while leaving it no less obscure. Nevertheless, there is some interest in knowing whether we have to do with a general faculty latent in all men or an inexplicable privilege reserved to rare individuals. The exceptional should always be eliminated, if possible, and not left to hang over the abyss like an unfinished bridge leading to nothing. ”

“ Is this once more an unexpected character of the eccentric physiology of our unknown guest? Here are faculties more precious than the most precious faculties that have made us what we are, faculties whose magic buds sprout on every side underneath our intelligence but have never burst into flower, as though a wind from another sphere had killed them with its icy breath. Is it because it occupies itself first and foremost with the species that it thus neglects the individual? ”

“ The mode of life which was familiar to himself, he did not suppose unknown to others, nor imagined that he could give pleasure by telling that of which it was, in his little country, impossible to be ignorant. ”

“ When I speak of the present position of the mystery, I of course do not mean the mystery of life, its end and its beginnings, nor yet the great riddle of the universe which lies about us. In this sense, all is mystery, and, as I have said elsewhere, is likely always to remain so; nor is it probable that we shall ever touch any point of even the utmost borders of knowledge or certainty. It is here a question of that which, in the midst of this recognized and usual mystery, the familiar mystery of which we are almost oblivious, suddenly disturbs the regular course of our general ignorance. ”

“ They suggest blows struck from without by an Unknown even more unknown than that which we think we know, an Unknown which is not that of the universe, not that which we have gradually made into an inoffensive and amiable Unknown, even as we have made the universe a son of province of the earth, but a stranger arriving from another world, an unexpected visitor who comes in a rather sinister way to trouble the comfortable quiet in which we were slumbering, rocked by the firm and watchful hand of orthodox science. ”

“ We pretend to know the Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable. Unknowable to us at present, yes! Unknowable for ever, in other possible stages of existence? We have reached a region into which we cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us ”

“ But that the unapparent, the unseen and unknown by men is [better] , [15] he says in these words: “An unapparent harmony is better than an apparent.” He thus commends and admires that which is unknown to him before that which is known, and the invisible before that which can be [seen] . ”

“ How sublime is their position, and how over-topping, how sky-reaching, how supreme—the two Great Unknowns, the two Illustrious Conjecturabilities! They are the best-known unknown persons that have ever drawn breath upon the planet. ”

“ Know, O thou infatuated lover, that the golden glamour of our Other Half, Man's ectype, Woman, is not like a simple musical theme, but one infinitely various, containing ten thousand notes, and stirring like a churning stick all the emotions in the ocean of the soul of man. ”

“ We should be wrong, however, to fix all our attention on these extraordinary phenomena, either those with which we unduly connect the deceased or those no less striking ones in which we do not believe that they take part. They are evidently precious points of emergence that enable us approximately to mark the extent, the forms and the habits of our mystery. ”

“ When all is said, it is perhaps only in the theory which attributes those premonitions to our subconsciousness that we are able to find, if not a justification, at least a sort of explanation of that formidable reticence. They accord fairly well with the strange, inconsistent, whimsical and disconcerting character of the unknown entity within us that seems to live on nothing but nondescript fare borrowed from worlds to which nor intelligence as yet has no access. ”

“ The worm that never dies! the thorn within,
That pricks and pains; the whip and scourge of sin:
The voice of God in man! which, without rest,
Doth softly cry within a troubled breast;
To all temptations is that soul left free
That makes not to itself a curb of thee! ”

“ The important thing for the moment is the accumulation of claims and experiments that go feeling their way farther and farther along all the paths of the unknown. Meanwhile, that one unexpected door which sheds at the back of our old convictions more than one unexpected door, which sheds upon the life and habits of our secret being sufficient light to puzzle us for many a long day. ”

“ Let us keep to the facts as we see them: an unknown faculty, buried deep in our being and generally inactive, perceives, on rare occasions, events that have not yet taken place. We possess but one certainty on this subject, namely, that the phenomenon actually occurs within ourselves; it is therefore within ourselves that we must first study it, without burdening ourselves with suppositions which remove it from its centre and simply shift the mystery. ”

“ I could understand that we should be obliged to do so if there were no similar phenomena outside them; but in the intuition and clairvoyance of nonspiritualistic mediums and particularly in psychometry we obtain communications between one subconsciousness and another and revelations of unknown, forgotten or future incidents which are equally striking, though stripped of the vapid gossip and tedium reminiscences with which we are overwhelmed by defunct persons who are all the more jealous to prove their identity inasmuch as they know that they do not exist. ”

“ There is no knight in the world that shall desire to do you a wrong, but I will help you against him to my power."
"Such love," saith she, "is the common love that knight ought to bear to lady. Would you do as much for another?"
"Lady," saith he, "It well may be, but more readily shall a man give help in one place than in another."
The Queen would fain that Perceval should pledge himself to her further than he did, and the more she looketh at him the better he pleaseth her, and the more is she taken with him and the more desirous of his love. ”

“ Some, doubtless, whom we do not know, whose names were never written, even for a few years, on the records of mankind--men and women in unknown villages and humble homes, "the faithful who were not famous." ”

“ We here find one of those innumerous instances of a lost or anticipated power which make us suspect that mankind has forestalled or forgotten all that we believe ourselves to be discovering. Remember that there is almost always some distorted, misapprehended or dimly—seen truth at the bottom of the most eccentric and wildest creeds, superstitions and legends. ”

“ When we look into the matter closely, there is, under those anomalous and confused manifestations, in spite of efforts which we feel to be enormous and persevering, a sort of incapacity for self expression and action which is bound to attract our attention. Is our conscious and individual life separated by impenetrable worlds from our subconscious and probably universal life? Does our unknown guest speak an unknown language and do the words which it speaks and which we think that we understand disclose its thought? ”

“ He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt. ”

“ The earth shook under us and behold, there came down upon us from the top of the castle a huge creature, in the likeness of a man, black of colour and tall of stature, as he were a great palm tree, with eyes like coals of fire and tusks like boar’s tusks and a vast big mouth like the mouth of a well. ”

“ Never man had such a treasure;
But I die with jealous care,
In the midst of all my pleasure.
Free and easie without pride,
Is her language and her fashion;
Setting gentle love aside,
She is not mov'd with any passion. ”

“ Each man's thy slave, and womankind's thy—.
Methinks I see thee underneath the shade
Of golden canopies supinely laid;
Thy crouching slaves, all silent as the night,
But at thy nod, all active as the light.
Secure in solid sloath, thou there doest reign,
And feelst the ioyes of love without the pain.
Each female courts thee with a wishing eye,
Whilst thou with awfull pride walkst careless by;
Till thy kind pleadge at last markes out the dame,
Thou fanciest most to quench thy present flame. ”

“ Practises how to breathe her last:
Or sighs for poor man's misery,
Or pants for fair eternity.
Go to the dull church-yard, and see
Those hillocks of mortality;
Where proudest man is only found
By a small swelling in the ground. ”

“ Noe cordialls can a dying man restore;
Thinke not your words, or this alluring smile,
Can longer my dispairing soule beguile,
Which drowned already in a sea of teares,
Cares not for tides of hopes, or ebbs of feares. ”

“ The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; ”