William Crookes Quotes

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

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

The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it.

Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.

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 would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.

Women. They are a complete mystery.

There are many things that I don't understand.

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

I'm up and down and round about, Yet all the world can't find me out; Though hundreds have employed their leisure, They never yet could find my measure.

The more you play it the less you know about it.

the sea is a place of mystery. One by one, the mysteries of yesterday have been solved. But the solution seems always to bring with it another, perhaps a deeper mystery. I doubt that the last, final mysteries of the sea will ever be resolved. In fact, I cherish a very unscientific hope that they will not be.

The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.

I love mysteries. To fall into a mystery and its danger ... everything becomes so intense in those moments. When most mysteries are solved, I feel tremendously let down. So I want things to feel solved up to a point, but there's got to be a certain percentage left over to keep the dream going. It's like at the end of Chinatown: The guy says, 'Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.' You understand it, but you don't understand it, and it keeps that mystery alive. That's the most beautiful thing.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

It is beyond my apprehension.

One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, and live in the world as if in a vast museum of strangeness.

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.

It was best to believe in all possibilities...there were more mysteries in the world than a man could ever hope to understand.

Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

I have a dream of what would have happened if what happened instead hadn't.

Life is very mysterious and there are many things we don't know. And there are elements of magic realism in every culture, everywhere. It's just accepting that we don't know everything and everything is possible.

If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me.

But I still couldn't figure out what it all meant. The more I found out, the less I understood.