Whatever is of consequence in life, is always hidden from view. What is manifest is the outer cover; what remains unmanifest is the soul within.

God only rarely reveals the future. When he does so, it is for one reason: it's a future that was written so as to be altered.

The imagination places the world of the future either far above us, or far below, or in a relation of metempsychosis to ourselves. We dream of traveling through the universe — but is not the universe within ourselves? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us — the mysterious way leads inwards. Eternity with its worlds — the past and future — is in ourselves or nowhere. The external world is the world of shadows — it throws its shadow into the realm of light. At present this realm certainly seems to us so dark inside, lonely, shapeless. But how entirely different it will seem to us — when this gloom is past, and the body of shadows has moved away. We will experience greater enjoyment than ever, for our spirit has been deprived.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

[Wisely does God hide what is to come under the darkness of night, laughing if a mortal projects his anxiety further than is proper… That man will be happy and master of himself who every day declares, ‘I have lived. Tomorrow let Father Jove fill the heavens with dark clouds or with purest light’… Let your mind rejoice in the present: let it loathe to trouble about what lies in the future.]

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

In everybody's life there are hidden chapters which they hope may never be known.

You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.

I don't think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking there's some kind of change.

And that’s the thing about pain. Sometimes it’s on our face as tears, and other times it’s hidden deep within.

MT: These texts are at one and the same time very beautiful and obscure; they need to be explicated, clarified. “What is hidden will be revealed.” Why must Revelation be hidden? RG: It's not that it must be hidden, actually it's not hidden at all. It's mankind that is blind. We're inside the closure of representation, everyone is in the fishbowl of his or her culture. In other words, mankind doesn't see what I was saying earlier, the principle of illusion that governs our viewpoint. Even after the Revelation, we still don't understand. MT: Does that mean that things are going to emerge gradually, but that at first they're incomprehensible? RG: They seem incomprehensible because mankind lives under the sign of Satan, lives a lie and lives in fear of the lie, in fear of liars. The reversal performed by the Passion has yet to occur. MT: Insofar as the Church itself has been mistaken for two thousand years and has been practicing a sacrificial reading of the Passion of the Christ, that reading is a way of hiding Revelation. RG: I'm not saying that the Church is mistaken. The reading that I'm proposing is in line with all the great dogmas, but it endows them with an anthropological underpinning that had gone unnoticed. MT: Why not just clean up our bad habits by sweeping them away once and for all in the year zero, making way for an era of love and infinite peace? RG: Because the world wouldn't have been able to take it! Since the sacrificial principle is the fundamental principle of the human order — up to a certain point human beings need to pour out their violence and tensions onto scapegoats — destroying it all at once is impossible. That's why Christianity is made in such a way as to allow for transitions. This is no doubt one of the reasons why it is at once so far from and so close to myth, and always susceptible to being interpreted a bit mythically. When Nietzsche says that Christianity is impossible, that it can only lead to absurdities, to outrageous, insane t

You know, it isn’t really surprising that there are things about ourselves that still remain a mystery to us,” he said. “Maybe we should be comforted that the knowledge is there, even if it’s withheld for a while.

We cannot know the mystery of the future.