Top 84 Enigmatic Quotes & Sayings

My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't. I know that's enigmatic, but that's sort of a general formula for anyone, actually.

Movies work, in my opinion, on the best level when they're more enigmatic, when we don't say it's this or that and where it raises more questions than answers.

Content to me is very important, but I like it when [the photograph] is also enigmatic. If you don't know what it is you begin to speculate, and that is what I want.

I'm well aware that I have been described in some quarters as being 'enigmatic, taciturn, prickly, explosive and forbidding'. Well, I have my moods like anyone else; I won't deny it.

Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true .

I get interested in writers who are enigmatic.

The New York Times' was enigmatic: 'Some unimaginable gravitational force is pulling our entire galaxy in the opposite direction.' End of article. If you stop and think about that, we are recreating ourselves.

What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality.

Thailand was never a European colony, so even though the city is very Western on the surface, deep down it's very Asian. It's quite enigmatic, and I like that. I can't get to the bottom of Bangkok, and I never will.

There are many artists that I know exactly where they are born and what their names are and where they live, which are still very, sort of, hidden. Even Nick Cave, who has a film about himself nowadays, is still someone who I would claim to be utterly enigmatic.

Your own tactic is to train yourself in the art of becoming enigmatic to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubld himself to guess your riddle--what joy, then, would you have in it?

I think when you write an enigmatic character into a film, you have to have real confidence that the audience are going to go with it.

Herschel Grynszpan's life was enigmatic, elusive and tragic. The traces he left on the historical record are just sufficient to tantalize and baffle historians. Harlan Greene has woven from these threads a riveting novel, erotic, haunting, and profoundly moving.

Eric Walrond, handsome, cosmopolitan, and beguilingly enigmatic, may have been the most promising literary talent of the Harlem Renaissance.... James Davis's finely written, beautifully paced Eric Walrond is a major biography of a fascinating figure.

Inexperienced players have a fear of this piece, which seems to them enigmatic, mysterious, and astonishing in its power. We must admit that it has remarkable characteristics which compel respect and occasionally surprise the most wary players.

It's always very fun to play someone who's somewhat enigmatic, but at the same time there are underpinnings of real concern for mankind. That was what 'Profit' had a lot of.

In his enigmatic and cunning story 'The Crown of Feathers,' Isaac Bashevis Singer refuses to produce uncontradictory evidence of God's will but rather mixes all signals, jams the evidence, stalls every conclusion.

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

The more you know about Bob Dylan, the less you know. A truly enigmatic artist, Mr. Dylan's work and life offer vaporous handholds, explanations, and instructions. Attempt to grasp them, and they will only dissipate and re-form into another contexture or idea.

Most pioneers are at the mercy of doubt at the beginning, whether of their worth, of their theories, or of the whole enigmatic field in which they labour.

Diane Arbus is one of the most mysterious, enigmatic, and frighteningly daring artists of the 20th century. Her work emerged from a deeply private place and profoundly affected all those who came into contact with it.

'Codename Baboushka' is an action-packed modern pulp spy thriller, in the sort of British tradition of 'Modesty Blaise', New Avengers and of course James Bond. It's a book about Contessa Annika Malikova, the last of a noble Russian line and an enigmatic, mysterious figure in New York high society.

I don't consider myself enigmatic, but I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my public persona.

The whole 'enigmatic artist' thing, I just ran with it.

It is the anonymous "they," the enigmatic "they" who are in charge. Who is "they"? I don't know. Nobody knows. Not even "they" themselves.

Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.

Jesus almost never talked in terms of explaining. He was always using enigmatic stories and difficult metaphors. He was always pulling people into some kind of participation.

I wished for eternal and intriguing muteness. I would be the Mysterious Dumb Girl, the Enigmatic Elf. The human voice no longer interested me.

Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.

The smudging makes the paintings a bit more complete. When they're not blurred, so many details seem wrong, and the whole thing is wrong too. Then smudging can help make the painting invincible, surreal, more enigmatic - that's how easy it is.

Stronach's fragile beauty belies an emotional strength, pragmatic resiliency, and intellectual courage. Her ideas and choreography are both enigmatic and playful.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

Written by the ancient Chinese philosopher of the same name, the 'Zhuangzi' is one long perplexing puzzle of a rambling collection of enigmatic short stories. It's a strange feeling to laugh at a joke written by someone in the 4th century B.C.

For me as an artist, the expansiveness of my interests and my influences make me enigmatic. I think any man can be that way - if you love enough interesting things.

Leadership is elusive and enigmatic, just as it is enlightening and empowering. It is a bright light among human energies that sometimes, by its very intensity, casts a long and dark shadow.

When I think about my own work, there usually is one or the other light bulb moment where there is this flash of insight. Where do these ideas come from? Supernatural? Enigmatic? Divine? You can take that any way you like. I think the human mind does a lot of things that we could call somehow divine.

It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.

'The Moonstone' was all I could have hoped for. A mysterious, cursed jewel, wrested from India, only to be stolen later from a great British mansion. Enigmatic, dangerous priests who follow it across the ocean in hopes of wresting it back.

I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.

In the time I spent with him, Jurgen Klopp was enigmatic, larger than life, and extremely quick-witted. He is quite unique as a football manager in many ways, and that is what makes him so entertaining.

Vampires are so old that they don't need to impress anyone anymore. They're comfortable in their own skin. It's this enigmatic strength that's very romantic and old-fashioned. I think it goes back to something of a Victorian attitude of finding a strong man who's going to look after his woman.

Quentin had an obsolete sailing ship that had been raised from the dead. He had psychotically effective swordsman and an enigmatic witch-queen. It wasn't the Fellowship of the Ring, but then again he wasn't trying to save the world from Sauron, he was trying to perform a tax audit on a bunch of hick islanders.

I was very camera shy. People like hot girls, so I put my music to hot girls and it just became a trend. The whole 'enigmatic artist' thing, I just ran with it. No one could find pictures of me.

And enigmatic smile is worth ten pages of dialog.

I have this theory, bands with enigmatic lyrics attract crazies.

Be fearless. Be glib. Be enigmatic. Read. Never give up.

A message in a bottle is one of the most intriguing things that you can find, the circumstance and method of delivery forever hidden but just the message sitting there, enigmatic, to decode.

Kate Bernheimer's fiction offers a unique and delicate gift, the tempting mirage of a grace that constantly escapes. The Complete Tales of Merry Gold is an exceptional, lovely book, beautifully enigmatic, speaking a language that mysteriously evokes the unspoken.

I hope it's not all I'll ever do, but I know I've played enigmatic characters. For me, the good characters are people who get places, are devious, are cunning and tricky and hard to pin down. Obviously, if you play one and you do an okay job of it, that'll be on people's minds.

Enigmatic - the quality of keeping silent and making people wonder if one is stupid rather than opening one's mouth and removing all doubt.

The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.

Experimental music scores are enigmatic, opaque, demanding, irritating, humorous, childlike; the best, like Cardew's Treatise, are also inspiring, giving rise, on occasion, to a music of vitality, intelligence and elegance.

Good photographs aren't just complex. They are enigmatic. Images are beguiling. And the way they play into our psychology, into our visual cortex, is something we still don't understand.

An elusive, enigmatic aura will make people want to know more, drawing them into your circle. Create such a power by hinting at something contradictory within you.

Women are really complex and totally enigmatic. Humans are really complex, but in film, we've only ever seen that with men. We've seen antiheroes time and again with male characters.

They wanted Bridgette to be this extremely enigmatic character. Im about the least enigmatic person on the planet, so I just thought what I did on the show was boring.

Black holes are enigmatic astronomical objects, areas where the gravity is so immense that it has warped spacetime so that not even light can escape.

Wolf in White Van is beautiful, enigmatic, and sad, and like every other brilliant thing John Darnielle has ever done, it seems to come from some fully imagined universe, of which we only get to see this haunting, enticing sliver. I utterly love it.

What passes for love is imperfect knowledge. Not knowing, initially, allows faithlessness to dress up as its opposite; casts the inarticulate as enigmatic, the selfish as forgetful, the angry as impassioned.

To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend lifetime trying to learn and understand.