Sublime Quotes - Page 21

• I devote myself to what I love the most, and for this very reason I hesitate to designate it with lofty words: I do not want to risk believing that it is a sublime compulsion, a law, which I obey: I love what I love the most too much to wish to appear to it as one compelled.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Love, Believe, Law

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• To stroll is a science, it is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.... To stroll is to enjoy, it is to assume a mind-set, it is to admire the sublime pictures of unhappiness, of love, of joy, of graceful or grotesque portraits; it is to plunge one's vision to the depths of a thousand existences: young, it is to desire everything; old, it is to live the life of the young, to marry their passions.

  Honore de Balzac

  Live Life, Passion, Eye

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• Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.

  William James

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Inspire

  William James (2015). “Pragmatism and the Conception of Thruth”, p.6, William James

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• Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified.... after a criseof hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyondand became entered by a rather sublime feeling.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Baby, Peace, War

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• The great charm of poetry consists in lively pictures of the sublime passions, magnanimity, courage, disdain of fortune; or thoseof the tender affections, love and friendship; which warm the heart, and diffuse over it similar sentiments and emotions.

  David Hume

  Heart, Passion, Poetry

  David Hume (1758). “Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects”, p.453

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• The imagination of man is naturally sublime, delighted with whatever is remote and extraordinary, and running, without control, into the most distant parts of space and time in order to avoid the objects, which custom has rendered too familiar to it.

  David Hume

  Running, Men, Order

  David Hume (1793). “Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects”, p.180

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• Heroism, or military glory, is much admired by the generality of mankind. They consider it as the most sublime kind of merit. Menof cool reflection are not so sanguine in their praises of it.

  David Hume

  Military, Reflection, Merit

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.521, Delphi Classics

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• Let us become thoroughly sensible of the weakness, blindness, and narrow limits of human reason: Let us duly consider its uncertainty and endless contrarieties, even in subjects of common life and practice.... When these topics are displayed in their full light, as they are by some philosophers and almost all divines; who can retain such confidence in this frail faculty of reason as to pay any regard to its determinations in points so sublime, so abstruse, so remote from common life and experience?

  David Hume

  Determination, Practice, Light

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.4014, Delphi Classics

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• I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, un-travelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.

  George Santayana

  Art, Stupid, Moving

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• His system of morality was the most benevolent and sublime probably that has been ever taught, and consequently more perfect than those of any of the ancient philosophers... He was the most innocent, the most benevolent, the most eloquent and sublime character that ever has been exhibited to man.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Christian, Religious, Character

  Thomas Jefferson, Joyce Appleby, Terence Ball (1999). “Jefferson: Political Writings”, p.266, Cambridge University Press

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• Christ was a sublime actor on the stage of the world. He knew what he was thinking of when he said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." I draw near to him at such a time. Yet he taught mankind but imperfectly how to live; his thoughts were all directed toward another world. There is another kind of success than his. Even here we have a sort of living to get, and must buffet it somewhat longer. There are various tough problems yet to solve, and we must shift to live, betwixt spirit and matter, such a human life as we can.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Jesus, Thinking

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.491, Simon and Schuster

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• Man is made of the same atoms the world is, he shares the same impressions, predispositions, and destiny. When his mind is illuminated, when his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the stones do by structure.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Knowledge, Heart, Destiny

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Essays and English Traits by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.305, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The most stupendous scenery ceases to be sublime when it becomes distinct, or in other words limited, and the imagination is no longer encouraged to exaggerate it. The actual height and breadth of a mountain or a waterfall are always ridiculously small; they are the imagined only that content us.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Imagination, Mountain, Height

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.136, Xist Publishing

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• Telescopes and binoculars endanger the ever-distant sublime.

  Mason Cooley

  Telescopes, Binoculars

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• A sublime soul can rise to all kinds of greatness, but by an effort; it can tear itself from all bondage, to all that limits and constrains it, but only by strength of will. Consequently the sublime soul is only free by broken efforts.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Greatness, Broken, Effort

  Friedrich Schiller (2015). “The Works of Frederick Schiller: Top Classic of German”, p.3528, 谷月社

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• Like a dart the present glances,
  Silent stands the past sublime.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Time, Past, Silent

  Friedrich Schiller, Edgar Alfred BOWRING (1851). “The Poems of Schiller, Complete ... Attempted in English by E. A. Bowring”, p.259

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• Name and fame! to fly sublime Through the courts, the camps, the schools Is to be the ball of Time, Bandied in the hands of fools.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  School, Hands, Names

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Illustrated)”, p.527, Delphi Classics

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• This is the process of Self realization about which Eastern mystics have written. It is the process of salvation to which much Western theology has devoted itself. This is a day-to-day, hour-to-hour, moment-to-moment act of supreme consciousness. It is a choosing and a re-choosing every instant. It is ongoing creation. Conscious creation. Creation with a purpose. It is using the tools of creation we have discussed, and using them with awareness and sublime intention.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Inspirational, Religious, Self

  Neale Donald Walsch (2005). “The Complete Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue”, p.112, Penguin

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• We never know through what Divine mysteries of compensation the great Father of the universe may be carrying out His sublime plan; but those three words, "God is love" ought to contain, to every doubting soul, the solution of all things.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  God, Father, Soul

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 270), 1895.

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• A really sublime moment is that when the last ray of light breaks in upon the soul, and marshals into a single group all the scattered disconnected truths there. There is such a vast difference between the moment which follows, and the moment which precedes this one, between what we were before, and what we are after, that the word grace has been invented to convey the idea of this magic stroke, of this light from on high.

  Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

  Light, Ideas, Differences

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• Kant, as we all know, compared moral law to the starry heavens, and found them both sublime. On the naturalistic hypothesis we should rather compare it to the protective blotches on a beetle's back, and find them both ingenious.

  Arthur Balfour

  Law, Heaven, Morality

  "Foundations of Belief". "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations", 1922.

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• Profound meditation in solitude and silence frequently exalts the mind above its natural tone, fires the imagination, produces the most refined and sublime conceptions. The soul then tastes the purest and most refined delight, and almost loses the idea of existence in the intellectual pleasure it receives. The mind on every motion darts through space into eternity; and raised, in its free enjoyment of its powers by its own enthusiasm, strengthens itself in the habitude of contemplating the noblest subjects, and of adopting the most heroic pursuits.

  Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

  Ideas, Space, Fire

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• In all nations truth is the most sublime, the most simple, the most difficult, and yet the most natural thing.

  Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sevigne

  Truth, Simple, Natural

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• How sublime is the audacious tautology of Mohammed, God is God!

  William Rounseville Alger

  Tautology, Audacious

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• What is there in man so worthy of honor and reverence as this, that he is capable of contemplating something higher than his own reason, more sublime than the whole universe- that Spirit which alone is self-subsis-tent, from which all truth proceeds, without which there is no truth?

  Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

  God, Men, Self

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