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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world,... he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part;... Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer's art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgment appear the only result of our ...most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People having speech defects sometimes learn part of the practice by laborious study, but good speech is always mainly unconscious... speech. Any tennis player, even if he could not explain this enigma, could provide an analogy for it. When he sees a rapidly flying tennis ball coming toward him, he knows what he must do. He must maneuver himself into the proper position, be poised with his weight properly distributed, meet the ball with the proper sweep of his arm and with his racket held at just the right pitch, and all this must be timed to stop the flying ball at a precise point. But if the tennis player pauses to think of all these actions and how he will perform them, he is lost. The ball will not skim back over the net, building air pressure as it goes until it buzzes down into the opponent's corner. If the tennis player thinks about anything except where he wants the ball to go and what he plans for the next stroke, he will probably become so awkward that he will be lucky to hit the ball at all. Rapid, precise muscular actions can be successfully carried out only by the unconscious part of the brain. And so with the speaker. He cannot speak well unless he speaks unconsciously, for his movements are as precise, as complicated, and as exactly timed as those of the tennis player.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach, to expound, to make simple; it is that "obscure inner necessity" of which Conra...d tells us, the irresistible creative passion of a genuine artist, standing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma that is life, enamoured by the strange beauty that plays over its sordidness, challenged to a wondering and half-terrified sort of representation of what passes understanding.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »