Douglas Preston quote: “What we have here is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

BBC broadcast (“The Russian Enigma”), London, October 1, 1939 ( partial text http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/RusnEnig.html, transcript of the "First Month of War" speech https://ww2memories.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/churchills-ww2-speech-to-the-nation-october-1939/).
The Second World War (1939–1945)
Context: I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

BBC broadcast (“The Russian Enigma”), London, October 1, 1939 ( partial text http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/RusnEnig.html, transcript of the "First Month of War" speech https://ww2memories.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/churchills-ww2-speech-to-the-nation-october-1939/).
The Second World War (1939–1945)

“Aren't you an enigma wrapped in a thick coating of contradictions.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

“Hamlet, Kiekegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.”

Harold Bloom (1930–2019) American literary critic and scholar

Jesus and Yahweh: the names divine (2005), p 10.

“Every human life involves an unfathomable mystery, for man is the riddle of the universe, and the riddle of man is his endowment with personal capacities.”

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) American pastor

On Being a Real Person (1943)
Context: Every human life involves an unfathomable mystery, for man is the riddle of the universe, and the riddle of man is his endowment with personal capacities. The stars are not so strange as the mind that studies them, analyzes their light, and measures their distances.