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Inexplicable Quotes

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Inexplicable Quotes

“May it not be the supreme aim of life thus to bring to birth the inexplicable within ourselves; and do we know how much we add to ourselves when we awake something of the incomprehensible that slumbers in every corner? Here you have awakened love which will not fall asleep again. … nothing can ever separate two souls which, for an instant, ‘have been good together.”

“All I had was a wary belief that there were more things in heaven and earth, as the Bard said, that one could explain. And perhaps we were not meant to explain these, perhaps we were only meant to experience these, live through them, and emerge, bearing on our bodies and our souls the carbuncles of the lived experience, now fastened onto our selves.”

“All his life he had been plagued by impulses to do something inappropriate or despicable for no reason: grab his dissertation supervisor by the ears and give him a big Bugs Bunny kiss, drop the precious vase . . . These thoughts arose from nowhere that he could account for and, at their worst, caused him to lose sleep. When he read Goethe's statement about every man secretly believing himself to be an undiscovered genius or an undiscovered maniac, he wept with relief. He lived in fear that the thoughts might show in his eyes. Usually, though, when he had reason to be offended, his mind was a clear disc of hurt, not a thought of any action, violent or otherwise. But something had changed.”

“One of the most breathtaking concepts in all of Scripture is the revelation that God knows each of us personally and that we are in His mind both day and night. There is simply no way to comprehend the full implications of His love by the King of kings and Lord of lords. He is all-powerful and all-knowing, majestic and holy, from everlasting to everlasting. Why would He care about us—about our needs, our welfare, our fears? We have been discussing situations in which God doesn’t make sense. His concern for us mere mortals is the most inexplicable of all.”

“We know how ninety-nine percent of the universe works," he told Carter shortly after they met, "and that's the clockworks, that's what we build with. But the other one percent makes the clockworks wind down. That's inertia. No one knows how that works, but it does. It's that one percent mystery that's the way of our maker. Put everything together, energy and inertia, the explicable and the inexplicable, and that's how you and I make our living.”

“El teatro de la realidad era siempre la misma función cotidiana y el sueño de la realidad era más hermoso que la propia vida. Nada más cierto que cuando comenzaba la mañana y la radio sonaba al despertar, sentía como de alguna manera no era sino la tarea de Sísifo, de vivir el paraíso de los sueños, sino para repetir en la realidad la condena cada nuevo día. Entonces este hombre, nunca sabré si en un sueño o en un espacio entre la realidad y los sueños encontró a su Penélope, que cada día vivía en un mar de infinitas posibilidades para olvidar y destejer el ovillo de la realidad en un mismo sueño cada noche, para despertar en un cama de hotel diferente, en una ensoñación, en un viaje alrededor del mundo de lo imposible. Sucedió que la divina casualidad, el más puro azar o algo inexplicable, hizo que ambos despertaran en el mismo sueño, en la misma cama, en un mismo día. A ella le gustaba irse de cuarto en cuarto, como en una galería de espejos paralelos hasta que él le tocaba el hombro. Entonces regresaba de cuarto en cuarto despertando hacia atrás. Era un amor verdadero, que vivía algo así como el día infinito, la realidad de la costumbre, que tejía su amor entre la realidad y los sueños. Sin saber qué parte era ficción, qué parte realidad, qué día era o en qué lugar estaban, tan solo un amor hacia el infinito de lo posible o de lo imposible. Era amor y lo demás, qué importa.”

“In one corner of the room are an array of small prints of the birds with gold foil laid painstakingly into individual feathers. This is not a room; it is a menagerie, and standing in the midst of it, I am one of its birds. Beside me at the door, Qamar is weeping, and I am trembling like a person in snow. One day, someone will try to explain us as they once tried to explain this, and they will not have the words.”

“Sonrió una vez más. Siempre sonreía como si las corridas de toros constituyeran un secreto especial entre nosotros, un secreto verdaderamente extraño, sorprendente y profundo que compartíamos nosotros dos. Sonreía siempre, como si aquel secreto nuestro tuviera algo de lascivo para los extraños, que nosotros entendíamos perfectamente, pero que no podía explicarse a los demás porque nadie lo entendería.”

“I think there should be a little bit of uneasiness in everything, because I do think we're all really in a sense living on the edge. So much of life is inexplicable. . . . The things that happen to you are usually the things that you haven't thought of or that come absolutely out of nowhere. And all you can do is cope with them when they turn up.”

“He was a fixture of the New Paltz community, an inexplicable light switch in the new apartment that definitely turns something on but you can't quite say what. You flick it whenever you get home and inexplicably feel a sort of relief, promising yourself that you'll figure out the wiring one of these days, but not today. Today, you are a bit too busy and this curious switch isn’t hurting anything by being a mystery.”

“Once we perceive that it is Judaism which is the root cause of antisemitism, otherwise irrational or inexplicable aspects of antisemitism become rationally explicable...Only something representing a threat to the core values, allegiances and beliefs of others could cause such universal, deep and lasting hatred. This Judaism has done.”

“The fact is, Scripture is filled with divine actions that don't fit our human standards of logic or morality. But they don't need to, because we are the clay and He is the Potter. We need to stop trying to domesticate God or confine Him to tidy categories and compartments that reflect our human sentiments rather than His inexplicable ways.”

“The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational - an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.”

“We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage - almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.”

“Being an artist and being a teacher are two conflicting things. When I paint, my work manifests the unexpected... In teaching it's just the opposite. I must account for every line, shape and colour and I am forced to give an explanation of the inexplicable and account for the variety of styles the students present.”

“Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.”

“I have seen Christians in Communist prisons with fifty pounds of chains on their feet, tortured with red-hot iron pokers, in whose throats spoonfuls of salt had been forced, being kept afterward without water, starving, whipped, suffering from cold - and praying with fervor for the Communists. This is humanly inexplicable! It is the love of Christ, which was poured out in our hearts.”

“Religions are not proved, are not demonstrated, are not established, are not overthrown by logic! They are of all the mysteries of nature and the human mind, the most mysterious and most inexplicable; they are of instinct and not of reason.”

“I have sat through an Italian opera, til, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street, to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention!”

“I have never seen an adequate description anywhere of the amazement, the uncomprehending horror of the bulk of the American people which preceded the firing of that gun at Sumter. Politicians or far-sighted leaders on both sides knew what was coming. And it is they who have written histories of the war. But to the easy-going millions, busied with their farms or shops, the onrushing disaster was as inexplicable as an earthquake. Their protest arose from sea to sea like the clamor of a gigantic hive of frightened bees.”

“Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute - and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? The nature of your actions - and of your ambition - will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept.”

“Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.”

“What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata, a physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees.”