Mystery has long captivated our imaginations, inviting us to explore the unknown and unravel hidden secrets. Whether found in literature, film, or everyday life, intriguing mystery quotes provide a glimpse into the allure of suspense and the thrill of discovery. In this collection, we’ve gathered 58 thought-provoking quotes that capture the essence of mystery and its power to spark curiosity and wonder.
1. “The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know.” - Sherman Alexie
2. “Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.” - P.D. James
3. “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?' 'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.' 'The dog did nothing in the night-time.''That was the curious incident,' remarked Sherlock Holmes.” - Arthur Conan Doyle
4. “I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.” - Sue Monk Kidd
5. “We have come from all the countries of the world and are going to Saintes-Maries de la Mer. Nomads of the enigma, we gather there each year after having carried our mystery through ordinary countryside and fluid towns. Since we become transformed by our wanderings we are despised by those who stand still and retain a memory of giant serpents and metallic green.” - Raymond Queneau
6. “I don't know anything!' Tim(Caleb) wailed.He'd never spoken a truer word in his life.” - Anthony Horowitz
7. “Nice day for a funeral.” - Anthony Horowitz
8. “The more this guy talked, the more he sounded like a fortune cookie.” - Kelly Creagh
9. “Tito snored away on the other bed. Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness… ” - Thomas Pynchon
10. “That’s the last time I put you in charge of the tequila when we’re making margaritas” - JoAnne Kenrick
11. “Listen carefully. I'd crush you like a bug for causing my wife one single moment of pain. Believe it. Fear it. ” - (Roarke)J.D. Robb
12. “The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake.” - Roman Payne
13. “I leveled the gun and fired until it was empty.” - Rachel Brady
14. “I rested my head on the wall behind me and closed my eyes, wishing my life had a button: Ignore All.” - Rachel Brady
15. “I am the prince of procrastination. It is my besetting sin. I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after” - Gyles Brandreth
16. “When I encountered these haunting words from Franz Kafka, I realized exactly why this light sermon about the search for God had struck such a nerve: "Everyday life is the greatest detective story ever written. Every second, without noticing, we pass by thousands of corpses and crimes. That's the routine of our lives.” - Stephen Kendrick
17. “He wrote: "A religion to be true must include everything from the amoeba to the milky way." Nothing must be excluded from our view and purview for any faith to be true. ” - Stephen Kendrick
18. “Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.” - Cormac McCarthy
19. “(About changing faith) At our best, Christians embrace it, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then.” - Rachel Held Evans
20. “C'est tellement mystérieux, le pays des larmes.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
21. “My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.” - Arthur Conan Doyle
22. “For surely as each November has its April, mysteries only are significant; and one mystery-of-mysteries creates them all: nothing false and possible is love(who's imagined,therefore limitless)love's to giving as to keeping's give;as yes is to if,love is to yes” - E.E. Cummings
23. “There is no such thing as magic, supernatural, miracle; only something that's still beyond logic of the observer.” - Toba Beta
24. “Analogy of scientist who try to reach the higher speed: A child ant is tired after the long walk in a body of a jet. It tries to find a method of traveling faster than walking.” - Toba Beta
25. “The sweetest smiles hold the darkest secrets...” - Sara Shepard
26. “No. No, I don't believe you'd betray me with her. I don't believe you'd cheat on me. But I'm afraid, and I'm sick in my heart that you might look at her, then at me. And regret.” - J.D. Robb
27. “So you want me to go to a human orgy, where I will not be welcome, and you want us to leave before I get to enjoy myself? ~Eric Northman” - Charlaine Harris
28. “The crimson leaf that blew past looked the twin of the one she'd picked up in the palace courtyard: a bloodied hand.” - S.M. Jonas
29. “Don't judge a book by its cover” - George Eliot
30. “My heart, for unknown reasons, seems to freeze in motion in my chest. I can see he senses it and he holds his pause to enjoy my suffering, prolonging my ignorance. “Viktor, what?” - Gwenn Wright
31. “Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement. ... The conventional big-bosomed blonde is not mysterious. And what could be more obvious than the old black velvet and pearls type? The perfect ‘woman of mystery’ is one who is blonde, subtle and Nordic. ... Although I do not profess to be an authority on women, I fear that the perfect title [for a movie], like the perfect woman is difficult to find.” - Alfred Hitchcock
32. “This is the day the Lord has made, suck it up and rejoice.” - Donna White Glaser
33. “The logic behind patriotism is a mystery. At least a man who believes that his own family or clan is superior to all others is familiar with more than 0.000003% of the people involved.” - Criss Jami
34. “Frankly, I wish I could make my heart quit doing an extra thump when Wolfe says satisfactory, Archie. It's childish.” - Rex Stout
35. “The mature fruit of mystagogy is an awareness that one's life is being progressively transformed by the holy mysteries being celebrated. The aim of all Christian education, moreover, is to train the believer in an adult faith that can make him a "new creation", capable of bearing witness in his surroundings to the Christian hope that inspires him.” - Pope Benedict-XVI
36. “(The Mona Lisa), that really is the ugliest portrait I’ve seen, the only thing that supposedly makes it famous is the mystery behind it,” Katherine admitted as she remembered her trips to the Louvre and how she shook her head at the poor tourists crowding around to see a jaundiced, eyebrow-less lady that reminded her of tight-lipped Washington on the dollar bill. Surely, they could have chosen a better portrait of the First President for their currency?” - E.A. Bucchianeri
37. “Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light…unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous…we don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.” - Annie Dillard
38. “A farmer, as one of his farmer correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is "a dispenser of the 'Mysteries of God.'"The husband, unlike the "manager" or the would-be objective scientist, belongs inherently to the complexity and the mystery that is to be husbanded, and so the husbanding mind is both careful and humble.” - Wendell Berry
39. “Her killer wrote a note on that stationary.""A note." Now Renquist's eyebrows lifted. "Well. That was rather arrogant of him, wasn't it?” - J.D. Robb
40. “Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood.” - Rudolfo Anaya
41. “...Don't insult readers by questioning the extent of their imaginations. Most need only to be nudged to solve a good mystery.” - Peggy Kopman-Owens
42. “The goodness of the world grew like moss in cracks, she thought. It grew, somehow, with hidden roots, nourished by something unseen.” - K.J. Bishop
43. “I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.” - Carol Rifka Brunt
44. “If you focus your eyes towards the horizon, everything and everyone walking in front of you becomes a blurry mass. That's what everyone else became. All of their dark wool suits began to mesh into one, and they began to rhythmically march in unison, all while I gazed at the sliver of sky that seemed to be pressed tightly in between the skyscrapers. I kept on walking and staring at the sky, and I began to notice the skyscrapers becoming larger and larger, and before I knew it, I had to turn to get to my building, and of course, the automat.” - Cristina Martin
45. “Books are keys that open many doors.” - James Rollins
46. “What the fuck are cavemen doing here?” - Peter Clines
47. “I feel like I've been ironing all day in high heels and no brassiere. ~Tizzy Donovan, Laid Out and Candle Lit” - Ann Everett
48. “The terror is trapped inside of him and paralyzes him. He closes his eyes again and tries to drown out the scream - but it keeps ringing and ringing and ringing in his ears.” - Suneeta Misra
49. “It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.” - Albert Camus
50. “He was still a mystery to me. And God, did I want to play Nancy Drew.” - Cora Carmack
51. “I never met a gal who represented a mystery to me in quite the fetchin' way you did. It'd be dull and dreary just to find out how a crook got in and out of a locked room to steal a gold-and-jewelled cup. But it's very rummy, and fascinates the old man a bit, to wonder why a crook didn't steal a gold-and-jewelled cup he should have stolen.” - Carter Dickson
52. “Avid readers are the most authentic creatures on the face of the earth, and their hearts and minds are not for sale at any price. "Mysteries for the Inspired Traveler" Goodreads blog” - Kopman-Owens
53. “We betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.” - Os Guinness
54. “He is nothing more than one of my pawns. However, he is not a normal pawn. He is a pawn that can get across the whole board in one move.” - Yana Toboso
55. “I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. What I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life of the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand: named images, nouns. How were they related? What were the verbs? Which syntaxes were indigenous to the place? I asked a dozen knowledgeable people. No one was inclined to elaborate- or they didn’t know. “Did you see the octopus?” Someone shouted after the dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was THERE, just then? WHY?” - Barry Lopez
56. “On a trip to Russia I bought one of those Matryoshka “nested dolls” that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside…it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making us a mysterious combination of good and evil, wisdom and folly, reason and instinct… (pp.80)” - Philip Yancey
57. “But truly it was not the money that mattered. It was the distant glitter of everything that was possible in the world, the things she had always wanted for herself and could not name and called happiness because there was no other word.” - Tim O'Brien
58. “No matter how offensive she's been to me, she continues to act as if she has some sort of God-given right to keep coming back for more favors.” - Diane Capri
