Profound Quotes - Page 11

• What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.

  Dallas Willard

  Stupid, Mean, Upside Down

  10 Copy quote

• Whatever will happen will happen, but choose your companions with care. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them. Otherwise you will not be able to bear their company for very long.

  Anne Rice

  Voice, Long, Secret

  6 Copy quote

• Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute...All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road...and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us.

  Victor Hugo

  Horse, Journey, Hands

  12 Copy quote

• The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Mistake, Lying, Soul

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History”, p.199, W. W. Norton & Company

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

  Virginia Woolf

  Sight, Long, Mind

  Virginia Woolf (1983). “To the lighthouse: the original holograph draft”, Chatto & Windus

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression "a place in the sun" first come from? My rational thought process cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate.

  Frances Mayes

  Fate, Expression, Blood

  4 Copy quote

• In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Spring, Heart, Love Is

  5 Copy quote

• Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

  Virginia Woolf

  Morning, Simple, Sight

  Virginia Woolf, Joanne Trautmann Banks (1975). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1923-1928”, Harcourt on Demand

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the government of the United States.

  Howard Zinn

  Government, People, United States

  4 Copy quote

• Reading is human contact, and the range of our human contacts is what makes us what we are. Just imagine you live the life of a long-distance truck driver. The books that you read are like the travelers you take into your cab. If you give lifts to people who are cultured and profound, you'll learn a lot from them. If you pick up fools, you'll turn into a fool yourself.

  Victor Pelevin

  Distance, Live Life, Book

  "The Sacred Book of the Werewolf". Book by Victor Pelevin, 2004.

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

  William Faulkner

  Book, Men, Thinking

  William Faulkner (1972). “Light in August”, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am alone in the world, and yet not alone enough to make each hour holy. I am lowly in this world, and yet not lowly enough for me to be just a thing to you, dark and shrewd. I want my will and I want to go with my will as it moves towards action. And I want, in those silent, somehow faltering times, to be with someone who knows, or else alone. I want to reflect everything about you, and I never want to be too blind or too ancient to keep your profound wavering image with me. I want to unfold. I don't want to be folded anywhere, because there, where I'm folded, I am a lie.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Lying, Moving, Dark

  6 Copy quote

• I have a deep and profound mistrust of all politicians.

  Craig Ferguson

  Funny, Humor, Politician

  4 Copy quote

• Then let me put it to you this way. There is seldom black and white in our world. Sometimes things we perceive as good have moments of profound evil, but profound evil will always tell you that it’s always good. It never admits that it could, in any way, be evil. (Alexion)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Black And White, Our World, Evil

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2010). “Sins of the Night: A Dark-Hunter Novel”, p.63, Macmillan

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, "This is my body, given for you," not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Spiritual, Years, Catholic

  8 Copy quote

• Read from a distant star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the earth was the distinctively ascetic planet, a nook of disgruntled, arrogant creatures filled with a profound disgust with themselves, at the earth, at all life, who inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can out of pleasure in inflicting pain which is probably their only pleasure.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Stars, Pain, Arrogant

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.553, Modern Library

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Delicacy, Ends, Abyss

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2017). “The Essential Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals”, p.46, Chartwell Books

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I had this wild thought that he was the only one in all this chaos who was just like me, and that was comforting and profound all at once.

  Sarah Dessen

  Comforting, Chaos, Like Me

  Sarah Dessen (2004). “Dreamland”, p.83, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this--whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Attitude, Wings, Black

  H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard (2011). “Mythos: The Myths and Tales of H.P. Lovecraft & Robert E. Howard”, p.14, Manticore Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.

  Bell Hooks

  Expression, Names, Focus

  bell hooks (2013). “Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope”, p.14, Routledge

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Anyone who realises what Love is, the dedication of the heart, so profound, so absorbing, so mysterious, so imperative, and always just in the noblest natures so strong, cannot fail to see how difficult, how tragic even, must often be the fate of those whose deepest feelings are destined from the earliest days to be a riddle and a stumbling-block, unexplained to themselves, passed over in silence by others.

  Edward Carpenter

  Strong, Block, Heart

  Edward Carpenter “The Intermediate Sex”, Routledge

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• When we truly understand what it means to love as Jesus Christ loves us, the confusion clears and our priorities align. Our walk as disciples of Christ becomes more joyful. Our lives take on new meaning. Our relationship with our Heavenly Father becomes more profound. Obedience becomes a joy rather than a burden.

  Dieter F. Uchtdorf

  Jesus, Father, Mean

  17 Copy quote

• I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Memories, Fate, Men

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2010). “On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo”, p.326, Vintage

  53 Copy quote

  Show source

• That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness.

  Henry Ford

  Hands, Differences, Devil

  19 Copy quote

• There is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Angel, Eye, Men

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ann Dexter Gordon (2006). “The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: When clowns make laws for queens, 1880-1887”, p.85, Rutgers University Press

  18 Copy quote

  Show source