As translated by Jerome Rothenberg
Venetian Epigrams (1790)
McKenna interview (1992)
"Foreword to an Exhibit: I" (1944)
Context: Art is a mystery.
A mystery is something immeasurable.
In so far as every child and woman and man may be immeasurable, art is the mystery of every man and woman and child. In so far as a human being is an artist, skies and mountains and oceans and thunderbolts and butterflies are immeasurable; and art is every mystery of nature. Nothing measurable can be alive; nothing which is not alive can be art; nothing which cannot be art is true: and everything untrue doesn’t matter a very good God damn...
"Computing a Theory of Everything" (2010)
“Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.”
Variant translation: The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
Original German: Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern dass sie ist.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Variant: The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
Context: It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (6.44)
“Men are adorable, but mysterious... How can he be so average, yet so full of confidence?”
Source: "Stand-up is booming in China, with women centre-stage" in The Economist https://www.economist.com/china/2021/01/07/stand-up-is-booming-in-china-with-women-centre-stage (7 January 2021)
Source: The Optimist's Daughter
Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter I (p. 6)
Context: There is mystery here, but a soft, sure mystery that is understood and only remains a mystery because I want it so. The mystery of the nighthawk against a darkening sky, the puzzle of the firefly along the lilac hedge.
Source: Attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 262.
