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Quotes About Sublime

Who has ever wandered through such forests, in a length of many miles, in a boundless expanse, without a path, without a goal, amid their monstrous shadows, their sacred gloom, without being filled with deep reverence for the sublime greatness of Nature above all human agency, without feeling the grandeur of the idea which forms the basis of Vidar's essence?
~ Snorri Sturleson
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
~ Socrates
All these young French poets, like the rest of the people, lived for the joy of living in its sublimest form, the creative joy in work.
~ Stefan Zweig
L'ammirare esteticamente il talento in ogni sua forma porta irresistibilmente ad analizzare se stessi, per vedere se nel proprio fisico ancora misterioso o nell'anima ancora semisvelata non vi sia traccia o possibilità di quella sublime essenza.
~ Stefan Zweig
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty-a beauty cold and austere ... yet sublimely pure and capable of stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
~ Bertrand Russell
Love is the spirit that motivates the artist's journey. The love may sublime, raw, obsessive, passionate, awful. or thrilling, but whatever its quality, it's a powerful motive in the artist's life.
~ Eric Maisel
In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
thick golden tendril
~ Bob Mayer
Bertrand Russell wrote about the beauty of mathematical science: "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
~ Frank Schaeffer
The sublime humorist is the most miserable, most pitiable creature in creation.
~ Frank Wedekind
invero gli dèi mi avevano fatto dono del privilegio più grande che mente umana possa concepire, la sublime libertà di odiare quelli che ci hanno messo al mondo
~ Friedrich Durrenmatt
In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages. Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains.
~ Henry David Thoreau
God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here.
~ Henry David Thoreau
If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime.
~ Henry David Thoreau
though leaving him always to remark, portentously, on his probably having formed a relation, his probably enjoying a consciousness, unique in the experience of man. People enough, first and last, had been in terror of apparitions, but who had ever before so turned the tables and become himself, in the apparitional world, an incalculable terror? He might have found this sublime had he quite dared to think of it; but he didn't too much insist, truly, on that side of his privilege.
~ Henry James
You start with the sublime and end up in an alley jerking away for dear life.
~ Henry Miller
She felt that in everything, sublime or ignoble, there was hidden a turbulent, a vital force, a significance and beauty which art, however glorious, was but a pale refection. "I want to live!" she muttered wildly. "I want to live!
~ Henry Miller
I like the monologue even more than the duet, when it is good. It's like watching a man write a book expressly for you: he writes it, reads it aloud, acts it, revises it, savours it, enjoys it, enjoys your enjoyment of it, and then tears it up and throws it to the winds. It's a sublime performance, because while he's going through with it you are God for him — unless you happen to be an insensitive and impatient dolt. But in that case the kind of monologue I refer to never happens.
~ Henry Miller
J'ai besoin que l'on me promette presque tout, tant j'ai vécu longtemps, trop longtemps dans l'ombre du soleil. Je veux de la lumière et de la chasteté – et un feu solaire dans les tripes. Je veux la déception et la désillusion, pour qu'il me soit donné de compléter le sublime triangle et de ne plus avoir sans cesse à quitter la planète pour voler dans l'espace.
~ Henry Miller
Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sand of time; Footprints, that perhaps another, Sailing o'er life's solenm main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again. Let us then be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time; Footprints, that perhaps another, Sailing o'er life's solemn main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There are moments from childhood that attract heat in our memories, some for their sublime brilliance, some for their malignancy. The first time that I was treated differently because of my race is one such memory.
~ Jesmyn Ward
The variety of shapes, colours and textures under her feet was, she believed, literally infinite. It must be. Each shell, each pebble, each stone had been made what it was by aeons of submarine or subglacial massage. The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the unfairness of human life into perspective.
~ Michel Faber