I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

All around me the world lies like an immense hypothesis that I no longer verify.

Misconceptions play a prominent role in my view of the world.

All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is.

I'm beginning to think it's very hard to know what to believe in this world.

History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

The world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact ...that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. ...in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise. ...The medieval world was... not without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women... had no doubt that there was such a design, and their priests were well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not rational, at least coherent. ...The situation we are presently in is much different. ...sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious. ...There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore... we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane.

The world is incomprehensible. We won’t ever understand it; we won’t ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery.

The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.

We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.

Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.

It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.