Quotes about enigma (68 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Just as I was starting on my journey the idea came to me for a new symphony, this time with a program, but a program which will remain an enigma to all— let them guess it who can. It will be called "A Programmatic Symphony" (No. 6). During my trip, while composing in my mind, I frequently shed tears. When I got home I settled down to sketch it, and the work went so furiously that I had the first movement completely ready in less than four days and the remaining movements are already clearly outlined in my head. Half the third movement is already done. There will be much innovation of form in this symphony— and incidentally, the finale will not be a noisy allegro but, on the contrary, a long drawn-out adagio. You can't imagine what bliss I feel, being convinced that my time is not yet passed and I can still work. Perhaps, of course, I'm mistaken, but I don't think so.”

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) Russian composer

Letter to a nephew (late February 1893)

Feeling , Home , Imagination , Idea

“Who says words in my mouth?
who sees through my eyes?
who hears my voice?
Our soul is from elsewhere,
between going and staying
the moment scatters,
between the appearance
and disappearance of things,
the silent and mysterious force,
we will forever remain an enigma.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: An ocean of souls

“The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma. The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Savior. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that, despite all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let Him go. He returned to his own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position.”

Albert Schweitzer book The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Source: The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), p. 397

Life , History , Study , Teachers

“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.

“We comprehend the earth only when we have known heaven. Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

World

“We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 183.

Thinking , Evil

“There is a strange kind of tragic enigma associated with the problem of racism. No one, or almost no one, wishes to see themselves as racist; still racism persists, real and tenacious.”

Albert Memmi (1920) French writer

Racism (1982)

Problem

“Ma vie est une énigme dont ton nom est le mot. (My life is an enigma, of which your name is the word.)”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Life

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”

Umberto Eco book Foucault's Pendulum

Source: Foucault's Pendulum

Truth , World , Madness

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

Douglas Preston book Relic

Source: Relic

“Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, "Come and find out".”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Smile , Thinking

“For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

Pleasure , Knowledge , Reading

“All novels… are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

Source: The Art of the Novel

Question

“It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificient activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.”

Jon Krakauer (1954) American outdoors writer and journalist

Source: Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster

“Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Love , Search

“Women were supposed to be the enigmas, but men? Moody, brooding bastards, the lot of them. A woman with PMS had nothing on a man. Where women might get hormonal once a month, men suffered their own brand of PMS on a daily basis.
- Faith”

Maya Banks (1964) Author

Source: Sweet Surrender

Women , Men , Faith , Suffering

“I'm a conundrum. Or an enigma. I forget which.”

James A. Owen book The Shadow Dragons

Source: The Shadow Dragons

Forgetting

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

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

“A filmmaker should never assume he's superior to his subject. I often find that even the simplest topic remains an enigma. The best film portraits not only evoke that enigma but ingest it in a process that renders what's invisible visible.”

Damian Pettigrew Canadian filmmaker

On documentary subject matter, Le Parisien (May, 2003)

“Prehistoric images speak to us more evocatively than any other element of the archeological record: colorful, vibrant paintings of horses, of bison, of a panoply of animals and humans that often seem alive and in motion. And yet there is a dimension of unreality about them… The images seem plucked from life… often arranged chaotically to our eye, frequently superimposed… sometimes apparently incomplete. …There is an enigma in these images, a profound challenge to our understanding of the past.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1992)

Life , Color , Understanding , Past

“Dark are the paths which a higher hand allows us to traverse here… let us hold fast to the faith that a finer, more sublime solution of the enigmas of earthly life will be present, will become part of us.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

In his letter to Schumacher on February 9, 1823. As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 361

Life , Faith , Parting

“If indeed the literal meaning, understood as it is spoken, should offer some benefit, we will have readily at hand what we need to make the object of our attention. But if something that is said in a hidden fashion, with certain allegories and enigmas, should yield nothing of benefit according to the readily apparent sense, we will turn such words as these over and over in our mind.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

Commentary on the Song of Songs, As translated by Margaret M. Mitchell in Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (2010)

Fashion , Sense

“Richard Corben, stands among us like an extraterrestrial peak. He has sat in his throne for a long time, above the moving and multi-coloured field of world comics, like an effigy of the leader, a strange monolith, a sublime visitor, a solitary enigma.”

Richard Corben (1940) American illustrator

Moebius}}
Source: Corben, Richard; Moebius (preface) (2001). Den La Quete, tome 2. Toth. ISBN 978-84-85138-21-0.

World , Time

“I suppose I’ve been knocking on heaven’s door for about 11 years now, with one sort of high or another. The only kinds of drugs I use, though, are ones that keep me working for longer periods of time. I haven’t gotten involved in anything heavy since ’68. I had a silly flirtation with smack then, but it was only for the mystery and enigma of trying it. I never really enjoyed it at all. I like fast drugs. I’ve said that many times. I hate falling out, where I can’t stand up and stuff. It seems like such a waste of time. I hate downs and slow drugs like grass. I hate sleep. I would much prefer staying up, just working, all the time. It makes me so mad that we can’t do anything about sleep or the common cold.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

As quoted in this interview http://www.theuncool.com/journalism/david-bowie-playboy-magazine/ in Playboy magazine (September 1976)

Hate , Sleep , Grass , Time

“Whoever said that Russia was an enigma inside a something-or-other inside something else, was dead right. I don't understand the place yet.”

George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) English-born author of Scottish descent

Pictures of Russia. p. 176.
The Light's On At Signpost (2002)

Understanding , Dead

“The art, also, of alchemy or chemistry is surrounded with such insoluble enigmas that we can scarcely gain anything but ignorance therefrom, and ignotum per ignotius.”

Robert Fludd (1574–1637) British mathematician and astrologer

Robert Fludd, cited in: Waite (1887, p. 291)

Art

“In such apparent accidents which finally produce such a decisive influence on one s whole life, one is inclined to recognize the tools of a higher hand. The great enigma of life never becomes clear to us here below.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

In a letter dated April 25, 1825. As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 361

Life , Decision

“It was patent that this terrible man was no ignorant clod, such as one would inevitably suppose him to be from his exhibitions of brutality. At once he became an enigma.”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

Source: The Sea-Wolf (1904), Chapter Five

“The enigma I will not explain – its "dark saying" must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the apparent connection between the variations and the theme is often of the slightest texture.”

Edward Elgar (1857–1934) English composer

Elgar's programme note to the Enigma Variations, quoted in Simon Mundy Elgar (London: Omnibus Press, [1980] 2001) p. 64.

“It is possible to regulate watercourses over any given distance without embankment works; to transport timber and other materials, even when heavier than water, for example ore, stones, etc., down the centre of such water-courses; to raise the height of the water table in the surrounding countryside and to endow the water with all those elements necessary for the prevailing vegetation. Furthermore it is possible in this way to render timber and other such materials non-inflammable and rot resistant; to produce drinking and spa-water for man, beast and soil of any desired composition and performance artificially, but in the way that it occurs in Nature; to raise water in a vertical pipe without pumping devices; to produce any amount of electricity and radiant energy almost without cost; to raise soil quality and to heal cancer, tuberculosis and a variety of nervous disorders… the practical implementation of this … would without doubt signify a complete reorientation in all areas of science and technology. By application of these new found laws, I have already constructed fairly large installations in the spheres of log-rafting and river regulation, which as is known, have functioned faultlessly for a decade, and which today still present insoluble enigmas to the various scientific disciplines concerned.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Viktor Schauberger: Our Senseless Toil (1934)

Law , Way , Drink , Nature

“Even though these complex systems differ in detail, the question of coherence under change is the central enigma for each.”

John H. Holland (1929–2015) US university professor

Source: Hidden Order - How Adaptation Builds Complexity (1995), Ch 1. Basic Elements, p. 4

Question , Change

“There's no room for enigmas in built-up areas.
Hedley Verityesque, McIntyre, Treadmore and Davitt”

Nigel Blackwell

1991
Lyrics

“There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.”

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Quoted in Kubrick : Inside a Film Artist's Maze (2000) by Thomas Allen Nelson, p. 10

Personality

“Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Le monde offre énormément d’énigmes dont le mot paraît difficile à trouver. Il y a des intrigues multipliées.
Part I, ch. IV.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)

Perfection

“…I never got away from the enigma of Coren's personality. For me he remains the most enigmatic man of his generation, because the sprawling palace of his attainments has so many rooms he has scarcely bothered to look into. He can fly planes, drive fast cars, dance accomplished jive, speak perfect German. But who is he? His writing never tells you, because its humour is a shield.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

On Alan Coren, p. 166
Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006)

Cars , Dance , Personality , Perfection

“I'm gonna take a wild guess—I think that was Buddy DeFranco, and possibly the Glenn Miller Orchestra. The band strikes me as an enigma, in that, first of all, some interesting harmonic things are happening as far as the individual voicings are concerned, but yet it's played in an older, tighter fashion. For instance, the bass player, if there are chord changes happening every two beats, plays the root for two beats, then the next root for two beats—that type of sound. The harmony, especially in the opening part where the theme is established, is a lot more modern than that kind of band would normally sound. I think that they're playing that way to keep that Miller identity, with that rhythmic tightness”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Reviewing DeFranco's arrangement of Billy Strayhorn's "Chelsea Bridge", from the album Glenn Miller Orchestra Under the Direction of Buddy DeFranco; as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#2nmgk677qzm4cnu by Leonard Feather, in Downbeat (October 19, 1967), p. 38

Way , Fashion , Thinking , Change

“The absurd and legendary devil is the enigma of the Church.”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer (18 October 1890)
The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer (1890 and 1891)

“When I was a student in the 1950s, I read Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. When you feel an overwhelming influence, you try to open a window. Paradoxically enough, Heidegger is not very difficult for a Frenchman to understand. When every word is an enigma, you are in a not-too-bad position to understand Heidegger. Being and Time is difficult, but the more recent works are clearer. Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that there was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)

Life , Feeling , Understanding , Passion

“For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, we fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero, of worth immeasurable; admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate Thinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless gratitude, would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assurance to them of their own destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do here, what to look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he first has made Life alive!—We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men. His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there. In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world—!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

Life , Men , God , People

“As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter II, "Religion", pp. 143-4.

Mathematics , Problem

“So intimate is the union between Mathematics and Physics that probably by far the larger part of the accessions to our mathematical knowledge have been obtained by the efforts of mathematicians to solve the problems set to them by experiment, and to create for each successive class phenomena a new calculus or a new geometry, as the case might be, which might prove not wholly inadequate to the subtlety of nature. Sometimes the mathematician has been before the physicist, and it has happened that when some great and new question has occurred to the experimentalist or the observer, he has found in the armory of the mathematician the weapons which he needed ready made to his hand. But much oftener, the questions proposed by the physicist have transcended the utmost powers of the mathematics of the time, and a fresh mathematical creation has been needed to supply the logical instrument requisite to interpret the new enigma.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

As quoted in The Century: A Popular Quarterly (1874) ed. Richard Watson Gilder, Vol. 7, pp. 508-509, https://books.google.com/books?id=ceYGAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA508 "Relations of Mathematics to Physics". Earlier quote without citation in Nature, Volume 8 (1873), page 450.
Also quoted partially in Michael Grossman and Robert Katz, Calculus http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=216746186|Non-Newtonian (1972) p. iv. ISBN 0912938013.

Mathematics , Question , Nature , Knowledge

“I must warn you that Gurdjieff is far more of an enigma than you can imagine. I am certain that he is deeply good, and that he is working for the good of mankind. But his methods are often incomprehensible. For example, he uses disgusting language, especially to ladies who are likely to be squeamish about such things. He has the reputation of behaving shamelessly over money matters, and with women also. At his table we have to drink spirits, often to the point of drunkenness. People have said that he is a magician, and that he uses his powers for his own ends… I do not believe that the scandalous tales told of Gurdjieff are true: but you must take into account that they may be true and act accordingly.”

John G. Bennett (1897–1974) British mathematician and author

John G. Bennett (1974) Witness: The Autobiography of John G. Bennett. Tucson: Omen Press, p. 244. Cited in: " Controversial reputation http://gurdjiefffourthway.org/pdf/negative.pdf" on gurdjiefffourthway.org, accessed 2013-04-21

Women , Money , People , Imagination

“How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Vol. 2, Ch. 3, § 39
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims

Life

“What I have created here in Italy is neither very big nor profound (in the old sense of the word), but formidable. This summer I painted paintings that are the most profound that exist in the absolute. Let me explain these things somewhat…. profoundness as I understand it, and as Nietzsche intended it, is elsewhere than where it has been searched for until now. – My paintings are small (the biggest is 50 x 70 cm), but each of them is an enigma, each contains a poem, an atmosphere (Stimmung) and a promise that you can not find in other paintings. It brings me immense joy to have painted them – when I exhibit them, possibly in Munich this spring, it will be a revelation for the whole world”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from De Chirico's letter to Mr. Fritz Gartz, Florence, 26 Jan. 1910; from LETTERS BY GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, GEMMA DE CHIRICO AND ALBERTO DE CHIRICO TO FRITZ GARTZ, MILAN-FLORENCE, 1908-1911 http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/559-567Metafisica7_8.pdf, p. 562
1908 - 1920

World , Search , Spring , Understanding

“Precisely as an enigma, the symptom, so to speak, announces its dissolution through interpretation: the aim of psychoanalysis is to re-establish the broken network of communication by allowing the patient to verbalize the meaning of his symptom: through this verbalization the symptom is automatically dissolved. This, then is the basic point: in its very construction, the symptom implies the field of the big Other as consistent, complete, because its very function is an appeal to the Other which contains its meaning.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

79
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Communication

“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.

“You worldly-minded people are most unfortunate! You are surrounded with sorrows and troubles overhead and underfoot and to the right and to the left, and you are enigmas even to yourselves.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 37

People

“The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma - human or divine - can deminish or demean. Indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.”

John Fowles book The Ebony Tower

The Ebony Tower (1974)

“You are a mystery in an enigma in a big ball of fur,
An irresistible magnet to every child and flea and burr.
Your nose is high-resolution while I live in a near-scentless fog
You run at high speed, while I just have to slog (but it's a good ol' slog)
So I just want to thank you for being my dog….”

Richard Summerbell (1956) Canadian mycologist

(Thank You For Being) My Dog, 2004.

Dogs , Speed

“The problem with the religious solution [to philosophical problems] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, 'Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.' For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.”

Steven Pinker book How the Mind Works

Source: How the Mind Works (1997), p. 560

God , People , World , Law

“The question of the size of the postwar population of the Soviet Union is not the least of the enigmas which have been baffling students of Russian affairs. Hardly any estimate or evaluation of an economic, sociological or military character for the U. S. S. R. can be made meaningful without an accurate knowledge of the demographic base.”

Eugene M. Kulischer (1881–1956) American sociologist

Kulischer (1949) "The Russian Population Enigma". in: Foreign affairs. Vol 27. April 1949. p. 497

Question , Knowledge

“The noble Nazarene … who raged against "the world," against the philistinism, the halfheartedness, the lack of ideals—if he had guessed that he was forging a weapon for the hands of exactly "this world"—he who sensed the misfortune of humanity so deeply that he didn't find any other solution to its enigma than to entirely reject and turn his back on all that is earthly, would see his name dragged into the service of an intense philistine optimism.”

Vilhelm Ekelund (1880–1949) Swedish poet

Source: The Second Light (1986), p. 21

World , Optimism , Sense , Rage

“If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

Joyce's reply for a request for a plan of Ulysses, as quoted in James Joyce (1959) by Richard Ellmann

Way , Business

“As much as I love her, I admit that she has always remained somewhat of an enigma to me…
I liked this about her. I liked the mystery she added to my life. I liked the occasional silence between us, for ours was a comfortable silence. It was a passionate silence, one that had its roots in comfort and desire.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Ira Levinson, Chapter 17 Ira, p. 222-223
2009, The Longest Ride (2013)

Love , Life , Silence , Passion

“Since some ecclesiastics deem it right to stand always by the literal meaning of the holy scripture and do not agree that anything in it was said through enigmas and allegories for our benefit, I consider it necessary first to speak in defense of these things to those who bring such accusation against us, because in our view there is nothing unreasonable in our seriously studying all possible means of tracking down the benefit to be had from the divinely inspired scripture.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

Commentary on the Song of Songs, As translated by Margaret M. Mitchell in Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (2010)

Study

“This statistical regularity in moral affairs fully establishes their being under the presidency of law. Man is now seen to be an enigma only as an individual; in the mass he is a mathematical problem.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 170-171 ( 1846 edition http://books.google.com/books?id=UkoWAAAAYAAJ)
Context: This statistical regularity in moral affairs fully establishes their being under the presidency of law. Man is now seen to be an enigma only as an individual; in the mass he is a mathematical problem. It is hardly necessary to say, much less to argue, that mental action, being proved to be under law, passes at once into the category of natural things. Its old metaphysical character vanishes in a moment, and the distinction usually taken between physical and moral is annulled, as only an error in terms. This view agrees with what all observation teaches, that mental phenomena flow directly from the brain.

Law , Mathematics , Problem

“I am always wandering around in enigmas. There are young people who constantly come to tell me: you, too, are making Op Art. I haven't the slightest idea what that is, Op Art. I've been doing this work for thirty years now.”

M. C. Escher (1898–1972) Dutch graphic artist

undated quotes, M.C. Escher Foundation
Variant: I walk around in mysteries. Each time, youngsters say: you make Op-art too. I don't know what that is, Op-art. This work I have been making for the past thirty years.

“I first heard of the 23 Enigma from William S. Burroughs”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

"The 23 Phenomenon" in Fortean Times 23 (1977), also quoted in "The hidden roots of the 23 Enigma" by Theo Paijmans at the Charles Forte Institute (13 May 2010) http://blogs.forteana.org/node/119
Context: I first heard of the 23 Enigma from William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.

“It is enigma enough that the world is described by mathematics; but by simple mathematics, of the sort that a few years energetic study now produces familiarity with, this is an enigma within an enigma.”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

New Theories of Everything (2007)
Context: Scanning the past millennia of human achievement reveals just how much has been achieved during the last three hundred years since Newton set in motion the effective mathematization of Nature. We found that the world is curiously adapted to a simple mathematical description. It is enigma enough that the world is described by mathematics; but by simple mathematics, of the sort that a few years energetic study now produces familiarity with, this is an enigma within an enigma.<!--Ch. 1, p. 2

World , Mathematics , Study

“Man himself is an enigma in motion”

Alain (1868–1951) French philosopher

Introduction
The Gods (1934)
Context: Man himself is an enigma in motion; his questions never stay asked; whereas the mold, the footprint, and by natural extension, the statue itself, like the vaults, the arches, the temples with which man records his own passing, remain immobile and fix a moment of man’s life, upon which one might endlessly meditate.

“One of the limits of reality
Presents itself in Oley when the hay,
Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is
A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.…”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"Credences of Summer"
Collected Poems (1954)
Context: One of the limits of reality
Presents itself in Oley when the hay,
Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is
A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.…
Things stop in that direction and since they stop
The direction stops and we accept what is
As good. The utmost must be good and is…

Reality

“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)