Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes

Savor the mystery, Stephen, we don't get enough of them.

Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?

As long as a thing is unknown, it belongs to us in a way that well-known things do not. For we have the opportunity to fill the empty, unknown spaces for ourselves, and in them there is room for imagination and for hope.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

If there were no mystery left to explore life would get rather dull, wouldn't it?

Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.

If there wasn't mystery, people wouldn't have anything to ponder. If you already knew everything, you wouldn't have anything to think about and life would just be really boring.

I love the unexplainable. It would be so boring to me if everything could be explained.

Most writers are drawn to what is unknown, rather than what is clear in any tale.

The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.

The unknown is always interesting.

Once, the world was full of mysteries, some of them frightening, some of them wonderful, some of them merely fascinating. Now, it can be a banal and predictable place, the tracks of daily life so well-beaten and defined, our culture awash with the imbecile obvious, our existence suffocating in safety. But mysteries remain.

I love the unknown. I love the discovery of what will be happening and just kind of sitting back and not knowing.

Life's supposed to be an adventure, a surprise!

'The Magus,' usually described as a book for the young, is about learning that the world is a mysterious and limitless place, beyond our control, and all the more exciting - and daunting - because of it.

Dig into life with wild roving abandon, opening your mind to the delicious possibilities that perplex the mind, entice the heart, and excite the spirit.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

From an early age I was very, very fascinated by uncertainty.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

I don't know what's on the other side.

Darkness is full of possibility.

I like the unknown. I like mystery.

I think people try so hard to learn everything that they miss all the wonderful essentials. There is so much mystery in life that you should leave a mystery.

As a young boy growing up in rural India, most of what I knew of the world was what I could see around me. But each night, I would look at the Moon - it was impossibly far away, yet it held a special attraction because it allowed me to dream beyond my village and country, and think about the rest of the world and space.

For every answer, I like to bring up a question. Maybe I'm related to Alfred Hitchcock or maybe I got to know him too well, but I think life should be that way.