Threshold Quotes

• The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.

  Khalil Gibran

  Inspirational, Education, Wise

  Khalil Gibran (2007). “Kahlil Gibran: Masterpieces”

  75 Copy quote

  Show source

• We stand in life at midnight; we are always at the threshold of a new dawn.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Hope, Dawn, Midnight

  12 Copy quote

• The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.

  Joseph Campbell

  Emotional, Hands, Horizon

  Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.43, New World Library

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath.

  Margaret Atwood

  Letting Go, Past, Years

  Margaret Atwood (2015). “Morning in the Burned House”, p.135, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you don't step across the threshold of what you already know into the world of challenges, you never truly measure yourself.

  Mariel Hemingway

  Challenges, World, Steps

  Mariel Hemingway, Bobby Williams (2013). “Running with Nature: Stepping Into the Life You Were Meant to Live”, p.105, BookBaby

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything; yours is the last house before the far-off: whoever you are. With your eyes, which in their weariness barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, you lift very slowly one black tree and place it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made the world. And it is huge and like a word which grows ripe in silence. And as your will seizes on its meaning, tenderly your eyes let it go.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Eye, Sky, Silence

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2014). “The Book of Images”, p.5, North Point Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Life, Love Is, Truth Is

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1975). “Toward The Future”, Mariner Books

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Art, Short Life, Opportunity

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Duff Traill (1824). “Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels”, p.75

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• All beginnings are delightful; the threshold is the place to pause.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Luck, Delightful, Pauses

  13 Copy quote

• There comes a time when the pain of continuing exceeds the pain of stopping. At that moment, a threshold is crossed. What seemed unthinkable becomes thinkable. Slowly, the realization emerges that the choice to continue what you have been doing is the choice to live in discomfort, and the choice to stop what you have been doing is the choice to breathe deeply and freely again. Once that realization has emerged, you can either honor it or ignore it, but you cannot forget it. What has become known can not become unknown again.

  Gary Zukav

  Spiritual, Pain, Knowledge

  Gary Zukav (2012). “Soul to Soul: Communications From the Heart”, p.42, Simon and Schuster

  83 Copy quote

  Show source

• And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.

  Joseph Conrad

  Differences, Steps, Moments

  Joseph Conrad (2015). “Heart of Darkness”, p.112, eKitap Projesi

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Writing, Heart, Ideas

  4 Copy quote

• The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities

  Gilles Deleuze

  Doors, Self, Two

  Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari (2004). “EPZ Thousand Plateaus”, p.275, A&C Black

  47 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm a dweller of the threshold and I'm waiting at the door, and I'm standing in the darkness, I don't want to wait no more.

  Van Morrison

  Philosophy, Doors, Waiting

  Song: Dweller on the Threshold, Album: Beautiful Vision

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• The threshold is the place of expectation.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Expectations

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1855). “Wilhelm Meister's apprenticeship: A novel from the German. Transl. by R. Dillon Boylan. Complete in 1 vol”, p.464

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.

  Carl Sagan

  Space, Overcoming, Tiny

  Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (2011). “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, p.73, Ballantine Books

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• Think of yourself as on the threshold of unparalleled success. A whole, clear, glorious life lies before you. Achieve! Achieve!

  Andrew Carnegie

  Inspirational, Positive, Success

  68 Copy quote

• We stand on the threshold of a twilight-whether morning or evening we do not know. One is followed by the night, the other heralds the dawn.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Morning, Twilight, Night

  6 Copy quote

• If only we can overcome cruelty, to human and animal, with love and compassion we shall stand at the threshold of a new era in human moral and spiritual evolution - and realize, at last, our most unique quality: humanity.

  Jane Goodall

  God, Spiritual, Compassion

  51 Copy quote

• Ennui, the demon, waited at the threshold of his noiseless refuge, and drove away the stirring hopes and enlivening expectations, which form the better part of life.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Blessing, Expectations, Boredom

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1835). “Lodore”, p.8

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on

  Samuel Beckett

  Pain, Doors, Long

  The Unnamable (1959)

  39 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have a thing for doors. I always think of them as a threshold to something new.

  Jada Pinkett Smith

  Thinking, Doors, Something New

  16 Copy quote