Sublime Quotes - Page 12

• [Alternate translation:] The Divine Spirit found a sublime outlet in that wonder of analysis, that portent of the ideal world, that amphibian between being and not-being, which we call the imaginary root of negative unity.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Science, Roots, Unity

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• And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

  Donna Tartt

  Beautiful, Stars, Distance

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• It is the treating of the commonplace with the feeling of the sublime that gives to art its true power.

  Jean-Francois Millet

  Art, True Power, Giving

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• Nature-the sublime, the harsh, and the beautiful-offers something that the street or gated community or computer game cannot. Nature presents the young with something so much greater than they are; it offers an environment where they can easily contemplate infinity and eternity.

  Richard Louv

  Beautiful, Nature, Games

  Richard Louv (2013). “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder”, p.82, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Yet the love we experience through other people is just a shadow of the love of the inner self. There is a sublime place inside us where love dwells. The love that pulses in the cave of the heart does not depend on anything outside. It does not expect anything. It is completely independent.

  Swami Muktananda

  Family, Heart, Independent

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• The true Way is sublime. It can't be expressed in language. Of what use are scriptures? But someone who sees his own nature finds the Way, even if he can't read a word.

  Bodhidharma

  Use, Way, Scripture

  Bodhidharma (2009). “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, p.29, Macmillan

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• No words will ever describe the exquisite beauty and charm of this mountain park – Nature’s landscape garden at once tenderly beautiful and sublime. No wonder it draws nature-lovers from all over the world.

  John Muir

  Beautiful, Garden, Mountain

  John Muir (1997). “Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, My First Summer in the Sierra, the Mountains of California, Stickeen, Selected Essays”, p.275, Library of America

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• From one sublime genius-NEWTON-more light has proceeded than the labour of a thousand years preceding had been able to produce.

  Justus von Liebig

  Science, Light, Years

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• It is regrettable that a Dostoyevsky did not live near this most interesting of all decadents (Jesus Christ) - I mean someone who would have known how to sense the very stirring charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sickly, and the childlike.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Jesus, Mean, Interesting

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• The sublime in art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Art, Expression, Infinite

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• Eloquence is to the sublime what the whole is to the part.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Eloquence, Whole

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• Peter Martin’s artistry is nothing short of extraordinary. To sing with him is sublime – to listen to him play is a transcendent experience.

  Dianne Reeves

  Play, Peter, Artistry

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• Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense, and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth

  Eric Hoffer

  Truth, Sacrifice, Self

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• The weak are not a noble breed. Their sublime deeds of faith, daring, and self-sacrifice usually spring from questionable motives. The weak hate not wickedness but weakness; and one instance of their hatred of weakness is hatred of self. All the passionate pursuits of the weak are in some degree a striving to escape, blur, or disguise an unwanted self. It is a striving shot through with malice, envy, self-deception, and a host of petty impulses; yet it often culminates in superb achievements.

  Eric Hoffer

  Hate, Spring, Sacrifice

  Eric Hoffer (1963). “The Ordeal of Change”

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• [Coleridge] selected an instance of what was called the sublime, in DARWIN, who imagined the creation of the universe to have taken place in a moment, by the explosion of a mass of matter in the womb, or centre of space. In one and the same instant of time, suns and planets shot into systems in every direction, and filled and spangled the illimitable void! He asserted this to be an intolerable degradation -referring, as it were, all the beauty and harmony of nature to something like the bursting of a barrel of gunpowder! that spit its combustible materials into a pock-freckled creation!

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Taken, Science, Space

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• Give out some love and you'll find peace sublime.

  Marvin Gaye

  Giving, Finding Peace, Adages

  Song: Right On, Album: What's Going On, 1971

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• In all my work there's this notion of the melancholic. You can make a photograph about the sublime, but you can't make the sublime itself.

  John Divola

  Photograph, Notion

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• I've been compiling a list of art project ideas for a long time. These are ideas of things I would love to see someday. They range from the practical - jackets with woodstoves in them - to the sublime - images of nuns on waterslides.

  Misha Collins

  Art, Ideas, Long

  Interview with Gina Murdock, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• No question is more sublime than why there is a Universe: why there is anything rather than nothing

  Derek Parfit

  Universe

  Derek Parfit (2013). “On What Matters: Volume Two”, p.624, Oxford University Press

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• By learning to open your heart and body while embracing and trusting all energies, from rough ravishment to sublime gentleness, you can open to be lived by the mystery that lives the entire universe.

  David Deida

  Heart, Energy, Body

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• Justice has its anger, my lord Bishop, and the wrath of justice is an element of progress. Whatever else may be said of it, the French Revolution was the greatest step forward by mankind since the coming of Christ. It was unfinished, I agree, but still it was sublime. It released the untapped springs of society; it softened hearts, appeased, tranquilized, enlightened, and set flowing through the world the tides of civilization. It was good. The French Revolution was the anointing of humanity.

  Victor Hugo

  Spring, Heart, Civilization

  Victor Hugo (1980). “Les misérables”, Viking Pr

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• Who can be sure that Jean Valjean had not been on the verge of losing heart and giving up the struggle? In loving he recovered his strength. But the truth is that he was no less vulnerable than Cosette. He protected her and she sustained him. Thanks to him she could go forward into life, and thanks to her he could continue virtous. He was the child's support and she his mainstay. Sublime, unfathomable marvel of the balance of destiny!

  Victor Hugo

  Children, Giving Up, Struggle

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• The most sublime efforts of philosophy can extend no farther than feebly to point out the desire, the hope, or, at most, the probability, of a future state, there is nothing, except a divine revelation, that can ascertain the existence, and describe the condition of the invisible country which is destined to receive the souls of men after their separation from the body.

  Edward Gibbon

  Country, Philosophy, Men

  Edward Gibbon (2009). “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edited and Abridged): Abridged Edition”, p.250, Modern Library

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• I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty . . .

  John Keats

  Passion, Heart, Ideas

  1817 Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 Nov.

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• Photography is a holding together of opposites: Light and dark, beautiful and ugly, sublime and banal, concious and unconcious. I am still struck by the power of photography to strip away the bark of the mind and reveal the visceral workings underneath.

  Jack Welpott

  Beautiful, Photography, Dark

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