“Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity.”
"Anubis" to the Sphinx, in Act 2 of The Infernal Machine (1932); Collected Works Vol. 5 (1948)
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Jean Cocteau123
French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager … 1889–1963Related quotes
Ichabod Spencer (1798–1854) American minister
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 421.
John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 267.
“The mystery has grown savage, and God has grown greater.”
Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: I do not care what face other ages and other people have given to the enormous, faceless essence. They have crammed it with human virtues, with rewards and punishments, with certain ties. They have given a face to their hopes and fears, they have submitted their anarchy to a rhythm, they have found a higher justification by which to live and labor. They have fulfilled their duty.
But today we have gone beyond these needs; we have shattered this particular mask of the Abyss; our God no longer fits under the old features.
Our hearts have overbrimmed with new agonies, with new luster and silence. The mystery has grown savage, and God has grown greater. The dark powers ascend, for they have also grown greater, and the entire human island quakes.
Let us stoop down to our hearts and confront the Abyss valiantly. Let us try to mold once more, with our flesh and blood, the new, contemporary face of God.
For our God is not an abstract thought, a logical necessity, a high and harmonious structure made of deductions and speculations.
He is not an immaculate, neutral, odorless, distilled product of our brains, neither male nor female.
He is both man and woman, mortal and immortal, dung and spirit. He gives birth, fecundates, slaughters — death and eros in one — and then he begets and slays once more, dancing spaciously beyond the boundaries of a logic which cannot contain the antinomies.
Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.
p. 37
Elizabeth Gilbert book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Source: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)
As quoted in Truth Against the World : Frank Lloyd Wright speaks for an organic architecture (1987) edited by Patrick J. Meehan <!-- p. 29 -->
Context: God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing.
Karl Barth book The Epistle to the Romans
The Epistle to the Romans (1918; 1921)
Context: The revelation in Jesus, just because it is the revelation of the righteousness of God is at the same time the strongest conceivable veiling and unknowableness of God. In Jesus, God really becomes a mystery, makes himself known as the unknown, speaks as the eternally Silent One.<!-- p. 73