Sublime Quotes - Page 5

• Under the sublime law of progress, the present outgrows the past. The great heart of humanity is heaving with the hopes of a brighter day. All the higher instincts of our nature prophesy its approach; and the best intellects of the race are struggling to turn that prophecy into fulfilment.

  Horace Mann

  Struggle, Heart, Past

  Horace Mann (1895). “Helps to Self-culture”

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• Suffering ignites the spark of contact with the sublime and offers proof of humanity.

  Lydia Millet

  Grief, Humanity, Suffering

  Lydia Millet (2005). “Oh Pure and Radiant Heart”, p.214, Soft Skull Press

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• When a man gets talking about himself, he seldom fails to be eloquent and often reaches the sublime.

  Josh Billings

  Men, Talking, Failing

  Josh Billings (1972). “Uncle Sam's Uncle Josh: Or, Josh Billings on Practically Everything, Distilled from Josh's Rum and Tansy New England Wit by Donald Day”

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• When I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, daffodils and thrushes; as little did I know what sublime mornings and sunsets I was buying.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Morning, Sunset, Littles

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• Even the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their lives. They will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our Friends have no place in the graveyard.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Friendship, Memories, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.203, Xist Publishing

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• There is probably nothing more sublime than discontent transmuted into a work of art, a scientific discovery, and so on.

  Eric Hoffer

  Art, Discovery, Creative

  Eric Hoffer (1969). “Working and Thinking on the Waterfront: A Journal, June 1958-May 1959”

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• The power of one fair face makes my love sublime, for it has weaned my heart from low desires.

  Michelangelo

  Heart, Power, Desire

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• Know you that Allah has made Islam the most sublime path for attainment of His supreme pleasure and the highest standards of his worship and obedience. He has favoured it with noble precepts, exalted principles, undoubtable arguments, unchallengeable supremacy and undeniable wisdom. It is up to you to maintain the eminence and dignity granted to it by the Lord, to follow it sincerely, to do justice to its articles of faith and belief, to obey implicitly its tenets and orders and to give it the proper place in your lives.

  Ali ibn Abi Talib

  Wisdom, Islamic, Order

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• Oh! weep not that our beauty wears Beneath the wings of Time; That age o'erclouds the brow with cares That once was raised sublime... But mourn the inward wreck we feel As hoary years depart, And Time's effacing fingers steal Young feelings from the heart!

  Robert Montgomery

  Heart, Years, Wings

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• A miser is sometimes a grand personification of fear. He has a fine horror of poverty; and he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm's length, but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance!

  Charles Lamb

  Distance, Doors, Want

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• What is sublime? / the artist said. / I haven't time / to be well read. / To be sub lime / I'll place, instead, / green citrus fruit / upon my head.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Artist, Green, Fruit

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• My idealism is clearly one reason I'm an artist. I see art as one of mankind's more sublime acts, as a vital counterbalance to our base impulses .

  Richard Schmid

  Art, Reason, Idealism

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• There is nothing I know of so sublime as a fact.

  George Canning

  Facts, Knows

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• The human intellect has not been able to conceive of anything more noble and sublime in the history of the world than the teachings of the Upanishads.

  Sivananda

  Teaching, Noble, World

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• Terrible and sublime thought, that every moment is supreme for some man and woman, every hour the apotheosis of some passion!

  William McFee

  Passion, Men, Apotheosis

  William McFee (1916). “Casuals of the Sea: The Voyage of a Soul”

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• While I know that the beautiful, the spiritual and the sublime are suspect today, I have begun to stop resisting the constant urge to deny that beauty has a valid right to exist in contemporary art.

  Ian Hornak

  Beautiful, Spiritual, Art

  Cover Magazine, 1994.

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• We hence acquire this sublime and interesting idea; that all the calcareous mountains in the world, and all the strata of clay, coal, marl, sand, and iron, which are incumbent on them, are MONUMENTS OF THE PAST FELICITY OF ORGANIZED NATURE!

  Erasmus Darwin

  Science, Past, Ideas

  Erasmus Darwin (1800). “Phytologia, or the philosophy of agriculture and gardening; with the theory of draining morasses and with an improved construction of the drill plough”, p.560

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• The love of fame is too high and delicate a feeling in the mind to be mixed up with realities, it is a solitary abstraction. * * * A name "fast anchored in the deep abyss of time" is like a star twinkling in the firmament, cold, silent, distant, but eternal and sublime; and our transmitting one to posterity is as if we should contemplate our translation to the skies.

  William Hazlitt

  Stars, Reality, Sky

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• That passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Cutting, Hands, Pieces

  'Table Talk' (1835) 20 January 1834

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• O, to bring back the great Homeric time, The simple manners and the deed sublime: When the wise Wanderer, often foiled by Fate, Through the long furrow drave the ploughshare straight.

  Mortimer Collins

  Wise, Fate, Past

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• I have devoted myself to architecture as a sublime act of poetic imagination. Consequently, I am only a symbol for all those who have been touched by beauty. The words Beauty, Inspiration, Magic, Spellbound, Enchantment, as well as the concepts of Serenity, Silence, Intimacy and Amazement, all these have nestled in my soul. Though I am fully aware that I have not done them complete justice in my work, they have never ceased to be my guiding lights.

  Luis Barragan

  Inspiration, Light, Justice

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• What is virtue? reason put into practice: -talent? reason expressed with brilliance: -soul? reason delicately put forth; and genius is sublime reason.

  Andre Chenier

  Practice, Soul, Genius

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• True, when you behold Damascus from the Salahiyeh, the last slope of the Anti-Lebanon, it is the realization of all that you have dreamed of Oriental splendor; the world has no picture more dazzling. It is Beauty carried to the Sublime, as I have felt when overlooking some boundless forest of palms within the tropics.

  Bayard Taylor

  Realization, World, Lebanon

  Bayard Taylor (1864). “The Lands of the Saracen, Or, Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain”, p.120

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• Divine love is the sublime boss of the universe.

  John Muir

  Love Is, Boss, Divine

  John Muir, Terry Gifford (1996). “John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings”, p.308, The Mountaineers Books

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• And when we view a flag, which to the eye is beautiful, and to contemplate its rise and origin inspires a sensation of sublime delight, our national honor must unite with our interests to prevent injury to the one, or insult to the other.

  Thomas Paine

  Beautiful, Eye, Views

  Thomas Paine, John P. Kaminski (2002). “Citizen Paine: Thomas Paine's Thoughts on Man, Government, Society, and Religion”, p.20, Rowman & Littlefield

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