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Quotes About Sublimity

He had sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king into the very slime pits of Siddim; but there was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not. And thus the abasement had been exaltation, and the loss gain.
~ Thomas Hardy
but there was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.
~ Thomas Hardy
The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.
~ Thomas Hardy
T]he sublimity and intrinsic dignity of the command in duty are so much the more evident, the less the subjective impulses favor it and the more they oppose it, without being able in the slightest degree to weaken the obligation of the law or to diminish its validity.
~ Immanuel Kant
Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.
~ E. B. White
Like all magnificent things, it's very simple.
~ Natalie Babbitt
I looked at Yuriko's face and was horrified. I had never seen her look more beautiful. She was almost godlike. It was the first time I had ever had that experience. She seemed to be more an effigy than a human being, too beautiful to be a creature of this world.
~ Natsuo Kirino
I worship you like night's pavilion, O vase of sadness, o great silent one, And love you more since you escape from me, And since you seem, my night's sublimity, To mock me and increase the leagues that lie Between my arms and blue immensity. I move to the attack, besiege, assail, Like eager worms after a funeral. I even love, o beast implacable, The coldness which makes you more beautiful.
~ Charles Baudelaire
Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man; whether those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of Tierra del Fuego, where Death and decay prevail. Both are temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature: -- no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.
~ Charles Darwin
Si vieras, a veces tengo miedo de sentir el dualismo de fuerzas que me impulsan. Cuando he sido demasiado sublime una temporada, tengo ganas de arañar... De dañar un poco.
~ Carmen Laforet
It is only the contemplative, witness-like study of objects that brings to us real enjoyment and happiness. The animal has its happiness in the senses, the man in his intellect, and the god in spiritual contemplation. It is only to the soul that has attained to this contemplative state that the world really becomes beautiful. To him who desires nothing, and does not mix himself up with them, the manifold changes of nature are one panorama of beauty and sublimity.
~ Swami Vivekananda
the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them. They do not give me anything, but my nature is to love the grand, the beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He is the source of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to be loved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do not pray for anything; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes. I must love Him for love's sake. I cannot trade in love.
~ Swami Vivekananda
I just knew nothing in the world, not the Mona Lisa walking through the Grand Canyon with the Holy Grail in one hand and a winning Lotto ticket in the other, was ever going to be that beautiful. Kevin
~ Tana French
Todo lo que es grande inspira un horror sagrado. Es fácil admirar las medianías y las colinas; pero lo que es grandísimo, genio o monte, asamblea u obra maestra, visto de cerca espanta.
~ Victor Hugo
Soyez un ivrogne de magnificences et de sublimités morales et titubez sur le genre humain
~ Leon Bloy
The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world's childhood men were by nature sublime poets...
~ Giambattista Vico
In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.
~ Theodore Roosevelt
There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.
~ Victor Hugo
alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know
~ Virginia Woolf
I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.
~ Virginia Woolf
And is there any reason, we ask as we shut the book, why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should not satisfy us as completely, once we grasp it, as man himself in all his sublimity standing against a background of broken mountains and tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky?
~ Virginia Woolf
Now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.
~ Virginia Woolf
Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one's conjectures privately, make one's notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone. Illness, it its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself.
~ Virginia Woolf
Great indeed is the sublimity of the Creative, to which all beings owe their beginning and which permeates all heaven.
~ Lao Tzu