The Inscrutable Quotes

#1. Reflective writing produces distinct rewards. A writer does not claim to live exclusively in the moment. A pensive writer retreats into oneself in noble attempt to meld memory, thought, faith, doubt, and other strong emotions into thought capsules while exploring the inscrutable web of creation.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#2. Through the inscrutable decrees of Providence everything has its recompense, and a visible calamity sometimes brings with it a great, if invisible, profit.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#3. My death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of "race," imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#4. There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.

Herman Melville

#5. The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.

Immanuel Kant

#6. Before exulatation had vanished, I felt as if I had been granted a marvellous privilege. Out of the inscrutable waters a beautiful fish had somehow leaped to show me fleetingly the life and spirit of his element.

Zane Grey

#7. The inscrutable laws of sex have so arranged that even a timid woman is not afraid of a fierce and haughty man.

Bram Stoker

#8. Familiarity with nature never breeds contempt. The more one learns, the more one expects surprises, and the more one becomes aware of the inscrutable.

Archibald Rutledge

#9. I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

Louise Bogan

#10. The inscrutable outpourings bend and intermix, each one a tributary unto the others, until the whole expands ineluctably into a spiraling morass that drowns the mouths from which it has come and subsumes the space almost entirely in black Finn (p112).

Jon Clinch

#11. When I'd first loved him, I wanted to take him apart, as a child dismembers a clockwork toy, to comprehend the inscrutable mechanics of its interior.
-flesh and the mirror

Angela Carter

#12. I must follow the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.

Bill Watterson

#13. Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech.

Mahatma Gandhi

#14. Failing to look inscrutable to any but the habitually dismissive ...

Thomas Pynchon

#15. His indiscriminate love feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself.

Michael Cunningham

#16. If I've learned anything, it's that we know next to nothing. Disease is a mystery. Health is inscrutable. The body itself is scarcely understood; we can only examine the secrets of the dead. And in all that dark ignorance, we're sometimes granted a rare moment of illumination. The truth is a gift.

Courtney Milan

#17. It is the business of a general to be serene and inscrutable, impartial and self-controlled.

Sun Tzu

#18. There's a reason publishers don't build on top of social platforms: publishers are an independent lot, and they naturally understand the value of owning your own domain. Publishers don't want to be beholden to the shifting sands of inscrutable platform policies.

John Battelle

#19. Anne looked up. Tall and handsome and distinguished-looking - dark, melancholy, inscrutable eyes - melting, musical, sympathetic voice - yes, the very hero of her dreams stood before her in the flesh. He could not have more closely resembled her ideal if he

L.M. Montgomery

#20. Russia! Russia ... Everything in you is open, desolate and level; your squat towns barely protrude in the midst of the plains like dots, like counters; there is nothing to tempt or enchant the onlooker's gaze. But what is this inscrutable, mysterious force that draws me to you?

Nikolai Gogol

#21. We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless.

Cormac McCarthy

#22. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away ... That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.

David Foster Wallace

#23. I have always felt that no matter how inscrutable its ways and means, the universe is working perfectly and working according to a greater plan than we can know.

John Perry Barlow

#24. The nearest approximation to an understanding of life is to feel it
to realize it to the full
to be a profound and inscrutable mystery.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#25. Once apparently the chief concern and masterpiece of the gods, the human race now begins to bear the aspect of an accidental by-product of their vast, inscrutable and probably nonsensical operations.

H.L. Mencken

#26. Clark liked to think he knew London but the truth was he'd spent most of his adult life in New York, secure within the confines of Manhattan's idiot-proof grid, and on this particular evening London's tangle of streets was inscrutable.

Emily St. John Mandel

#27. We arc the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God.

Thomas Carlyle

#28. So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.

Thomas Jefferson

#29. Rain, rain, rain. Like a benediction from some vast inscrutable hand, long withheld, finally given. The blessed, wonderful rain. For rain meant grass, and grass was life.

Colleen McCullough

#30. Better to be the cat gazing coolly down from a high wall, its expression inscrutable. The cat that shunned petting, that needed no one. Why couldn't she be that cat?

Laini Taylor

#31. What if you have all the pieces and the puzzle still doesn't fit?

Marty Rubin

#32. He gave me an inscrutable look that said maybe he would and maybe he wouldn't. Mister was a cat, and cats generally considered it the obligation of the universe to provide shelter, sustenance, and amusement as required. I think Mister considered it beneath his dignity to plan for the future.

Jim Butcher

#33. These warriors of the Sacred Band were inscrutable; they loved their war and death and picking through the bones of time to sort out right from wrong, good from bad, holy from profane, honor from dishonor.

Janet Morris

#34. The knots in the wood can't be untied.

Marty Rubin

#35. In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

A.S. Byatt

#36. In man's life, time is but a moment; being, a flux; sense is dim; the material frame corruptible; soul, an eddy of breath; fortune a thing inscrutable, and fame precarious.

Marcus Aurelius

#37. An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#38. Death has no repeal. It is a brute ending that leaves us the legacy of an inscrutable silence. Therefore, I understand the voice of mercy very well.

Janny Wurts

#39. With EarthEcho Expedition: Acid Apocalypse, we are working with youth leaders and noted experts on the changing chemistry of our ocean to help illuminate one of our most pressing and inscrutable environmental issues.

Philippe Cousteau Jr.

#40. Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society.

William Wordsworth

#41. I'm more concerned, just as you used to be, with the world as a riddle than with the riddles in the world. I'm more concerned with natural than the supernatural. And I feel more wonder for our inscrutable brain than for all these loose anecdots about the 'extrasensory'.

Jostein Gaarder

#42. The brain seems to be made up of a bewildering complexity of parts, and the cells within the parts seem to be characterized by an inscrutable complexity of form, extent, and relationships with each other.

Gordon Shepherd

#43. The ways of the British are inscrutable but they always seem to obtain their own ends without compromising their dignity or their honor.

Mahmud Tarzi

#44. People like to say that East Asians in general, and Japanese in particular, are not very expressive: there's that term 'inscrutable.' But often, Europeans just don't get the Asian codes. Believe me, the message is being expressed OK.

David Mitchell

#45. The determinations of Providence are always wise, often inscrutable; and, though its decrees appear to bear hard upon us at times, is nevertheless meant for gracious purposes.

George Washington

#46. I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.

Herman Melville

#47. Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Elizabeth Bishop

#48. I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.

Billy Collins

#49. Life! What Inscrutable Card Shall Ye Throw Next Upon the Soft Felt of Our Days?

Colson Whitehead

#50. America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese.

David Riesman

#51. Men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.

Cormac McCarthy

#52. 33Oh, the depth of the riches and s wisdom and knowledge of God! t How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

Anonymous

#53. Nonviolence is an attribute of the Almighty whose ways of fulfilling Himself are inscrutable.

Mahatma Gandhi

#54. Princes rule the people, and their own passions rule Princes; but Providence can over-rule the whole, and draw the instruments of his inscrutable purposes from the vices, no less than the virtues of Kings.

Charles Caleb Colton

#55. Positively, it is a summons to us to recognize that God the Creator is transcendent, mysterious and inscrutable, beyond the range of any imagining or philosophical guesswork of which we are capable-and hence a summons to us to humble ourselves, to listen

J.I. Packer

#56. O wise humanity, terribly wise humanity! How inscrutable is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living and forget to play!

Lin Yutang

#57. All this gave way to my first encounter with guilt, which is still something entirely inscrutable to me, as if aliens were sending transmissions from another planet, telling me there is a right and a wrong in the universe.

Donald Miller

#58. The easiest way to be inscrutable is to be completely straightforward and honest. Then no one will be able to figure out what you're up to.

George Hammond

#59. I wanted a love thick with time, as inscrutable as if a lathe had carved it from night and as familiar as the marrow in my bones. I wanted the impossible, which made it that much easier to push out of my mind.

Roshani Chokshi

#60. I believe in the efficacy of prayer and I have a deep and sorrowful sympathy for one who is without faith. I believe our Father answers every prayer-all prayers-with His matchless, inscrutable wisdom, with infinite compassion and with love.

Loretta Young

#61. Logos (The Biblical Manuscripts/Canon of Scriptures) & Rhema (The Person/Life/Words/Death/Resurrection of Jesus Christ): The 'special' & 'ultimate' revelation of God. Without these revelations God would be unsearchable, unknowable, and inscrutable."

~R. Alan Woods [2013]

R. Alan Woods

#62. If in the place of God we write "Reality", "Nature", "Unknowable", or "Zero", it matters not one whit; the equation is just as obscure; for all we have done is to replace a by b, c, d, or e, not knowing what these letters mean. The symbol has changed, but what it symbolizes remains as inscrutable.

J. F. C. Fuller

#63. Mothers are inscrutable beings to their sons, always. ("The Higgler")

A.E. Coppard

#64. I don't know where the universe came from or what happens to creatures when they die. I don't know if the whole thing's an unravelling accident or an inscrutable design. I don't know how one should live - but I know that one should live, if one can possibly bear it.

Glen Duncan

#65. It was curious how that beetlelike type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.

George Orwell

#66. Try to forget bit by bit, it will be easier on you. Leave it behind. Then the plane tilts in its escape and over the gray wing the city explodes into view with all its miles and spires and inscrutable hustle and as you try to comprehend this sight you realize that you were never really there at all.

Colson Whitehead

#67. The king of swords, master of his own emotions, master of his own intellect, master of reason, gazed out at them, expression inscrutable.

Maggie Stiefvater

#68. But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.

E. M. Forster