Infinite Quotes - Page 20

• Reproach is infinite, and knows no end.

  Homer

  Ends, Knows, Reproach

  Homer (1806). “The Iliad of Homer”, p.455

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• What is certain in death is somewhat softened by what is uncertain; it is an indefiniteness in the time, which holds a certain relation to the infinite, and what is called eternity.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Death, Eternity, Uncertain

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• I hung about the dangerous frontier of "guess," avoiding with infinite trouble to myself and others the broad valley of reason.

  Helen Keller

  Valleys, Trouble, Reason

  Helen Keller (2009). “The Story of My Life: With Her Letters and a Supplementary Account of Her Education”, p.107, The Floating Press

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• Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Organization, Literature, Irony

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• What! I should call on that Infinite Love that has served us so well? Infinite cruelty rather, that made everlasting hell, Made us, foreknew us, foredoom'd us, and does what he will with his own; Better our dead brute mother who never has heard us groan.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Mother, Atheism, Doe

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Illustrated)”, p.1373, Delphi Classics

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• Taste, when once obtained, may be said to be no acquiring faculty, and must remain stationary; but knowledge is of perpetual growth and has infinite demands. Taste, like an artificial canal, winds through a beautiful country, but its borders are confined and its term is limited. Knowledge navigates the ocean, and is perpetually on voyages of discovery.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Beautiful, Country, Ocean

  Isaac Disraeli, Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield) (1858). “Curiosities of Literature”, p.392

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• For Thomas Traherne (c. 1636-1674), one of the sanest men who ever lived, to see the world with the eyes of innocence, and so to see it pervaded by a numinous glory, is to see things as they truly are, and to recognize creation as the mirror of God's infinite beauty.

  David Bentley

  Eye, Men, Infinite Beauty

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• I learned what education really is: the penetrating deeper and rising higher into life, as well as making continually wider explorations; the rounding of the whole human being out of its nebulous elements into form, as planets and suns are rounded, until they give out safe and steady light. This makes the process a infinite one, not possible to be completed at any school.

  Lucy Larcom

  Education, School, Light

  Lucy Larcom (1889). “A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory”

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• It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.

  Herman Melville

  Wisdom, Subjects, Hard

  Herman Melville, Harrison Hayford, G. Thomas Tanselle (1987). “Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860: Volume Nine, Scholarly Edition”, p.253, Northwestern University Press

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• It is the "where I am" that makes heaven. The life after death might become through its very endlessness a burden to our spirits, if it were not to be filled with the infinite variety and freshness of God's love. Some have shrunk from its very infinitude, because they have not realized what God's love can make of it. Human love helps us to understand this. When we have come to love any one with all our power of affection, then there is no monotony or weariness in the days and hours we spend with them.

  Maltbie Davenport Babcock

  Future, Heaven, Might

  Maltbie Davenport Babcock (1901). “Thoughts for Every-day Living from the Spoken and Written Words of Maltbie Davenport Babcock”

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• Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable barrier, and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Mean, Reality, Men

  Thomas Carlyle (1869). “Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh : in Three Books”, p.131

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• The truths of nature are one eternal change, one infinite variety. There is no bush on the face of the globe exactly like another bush; there are no two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same network, nor two leaves on the same tree which could not be told one from the other, nor two waves in the sea exactly alike.

  John Ruskin

  Nature, Sea, Two

  John Ruskin (1848). “Modern Painters”, p.55

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• Never fear to bring the sublimest motive to the smallest duty, and the most infinite comfort to the smallest trouble.

  Phillips Brooks

  Comfort, Trouble, Duty

  Phillips Brooks “The Joy of Preaching”, Kregel Publications

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• What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Life, Space, People

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2015). “The Last Man”, p.288, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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• A saint is simply a human being whose soul has ... grown up to its full stature, by full and generous response to its environment, God. He has achieved a deeper, bigger life than the rest of us, a more wonderful contact with the mysteries of the Universe; a life of infinite possibility, the term of which he never feels that he has reached.

  Evelyn Underhill

  Soul, Saint, Mystery

  Evelyn Underhill (2006). “Lent With Evelyn Underhill”, p.34, A&C Black

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• Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.

  Randall Jarrell

  Voice, Age, Novelists

  Randall Jarrell (2010). “Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy”, p.9, University of Chicago Press

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• Our infinite obligations to God do not fill our hearts half as much as a petty uneasiness of our own; nor His infinite perfections as much as our smallest wants.

  Hannah More

  Heart, Perfection, Selfishness

  Hannah More (1840). “Miscellaneous Works: Tragedies. Miscellaneous poems. Hymns and ballads. Sacred Dramas. Coelebs. Practical piety. Moriana”, p.719

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• With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul's infinite.

  Honore de Balzac

  Punishment, Expectations, Soul

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• Another sad comestive truth is that the best foods are the products of infinite and wearying trouble. The trouble need not be taken by the consumer, but someone, ever since the Fall, has had to take it.

  Rose Macaulay

  Taken, Food, Fall

  Rose Macaulay (2011). “Personal Pleasures”, p.75, A&C Black

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• When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also a revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expanse. The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homogenous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.

  Mircea Eliade

  Reality, Space, Sacred

  "The Structure of Religious Knowing: Encountering the Sacred in Eliade and Lonergan". Book by John Daniel Dadosky, p. 89, 2004.

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• Temptation is a fearful word. It indicates the beginning of a possible series of infinite evils. It is the ringing of an alarm bell, whose melancholy sounds may reverberate through eternity. Like the sudden, sharp cry of "Fire!" under our windows by night, it should rouse us to instantaneous action, and brace every muscle to its highest tension.

  Horace Mann

  Night, Fire, Evil

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• We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.

  Harold Bloom

  Past, Journey, Three

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Prayer is so mighty an instrument that no one ever thoroughly mastered all its keys. They sweep along the infinite scale of man's wants and God's goodness.

  Hugh Miller

  Prayer, Men, Keys

  Hugh Miller (1870). “The Headship of Christ: And, The Rights of the Christian People : a Collection of Essays, Historical and Descriptive Sketches, and Personal Portraitures with the Author's Celebrated Letter to Lord Brougham”, p.354

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• Certainly it was no design of the atoms to place themselves in a particular order, nor did they decide what motions each should have. But atoms were struck with blows in many ways and carried along by their own weight from infinite times up to the present.

  Lucretius

  Blow, Order, Should Have

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• We never have a full demonstration, although there is always an underlying reason for the truth, even if it is only perfectly understood by God, who alone penetrated the infinite series in one stroke of the mind.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Mind, Reason, Demonstration

  "The Shorter Leibniz Texts: A Collection of New Translations". Book edited by Lloyd H. Strickland, p. 11, 2006.

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