Abyss Quotes - Page 13

• When sleep enters the body like smoke
  and man journeys into the abyss
  like an extinguished star that is lighted elsewhere,
  then all quarrel ceases,
  overworked nag that has tossed the nightmare grip
  of its rider.

  Nelly Sachs

  Stars, Sleep, Journey

  Nelly Sachs (1967). “O the Chimneys: Selected Poems, Including the Verse Play, Eli”, New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• Anxieties about ourselves endure. If our proper study is indeed the study of humankind, then it has seemed-and still seems-to many that the study is dangerous. Perhaps we shall find out that we were not what we took ourselves to be. But if the historical development of science has indeed sometimes pricked our vanity, it has not plunged us into an abyss of immorality. Arguably, it has liberated us from misconceptions, and thereby aided us in our moral progress.

  Philip Kitcher

  Vanity, Anxiety, Historical

  Philip Kitcher (1982). “Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism”, p.202, MIT Press

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• Safety lies in tending towards our highest and not in resting content with an inferior potentiality..... To rest in or follow after an inferior potentiality may seem safe, rational, comfortable, easy, but it ends badly, in some futility or in a mere circling down the abyss or in a stagnant morass. Our right and natural road is towards the summits.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Lying, Safety, May

  Sri Aurobindo (1999). “The Human Cycle, Psychology of Social Development”, p.183, Lotus Press

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• Love guards the heart from the abyss.

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  Heart

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• Does it seem all but incredible to you that intelligence should travel for two thousand miles, along those slender copper lines, far down in the all but fathomless Atlantic; never before penetrated … save when some foundering vessel has plunged with her hapless company to the eternal silence and darkness of the abyss? Does it seem … but a miracle … that the thoughts of living men … should burn over the cold, green bones of men and women, whose hearts, once as warm as ours, burst as the eternal gulfs closed and roared over them centuries ago?

  Edward Everett

  Travel, Ocean, Heart

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• You are confronted with abysses of time that are, in a way, unfathomable. You see a painting in charcoal of raindeer and it was left unfinished and somebody else finished it. But through radio carbon dating we know that the next one completed the painting 5,000 years later. You're just blown away by the notion of passage of time. We have no relationship to that kind of depth of time.

  Werner Herzog

  Years, Dating, Radio

  "Cave of Forgotten Dreams (3D) - Werner Herzog interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• Nietzsche, who you don't spend too much time with after the age of seventeen, did have that one great line about "he who stares into the abyss must know that the abyss also stares into him" and I never really understood that until my friend got killed and you really get your head around the idea of what horror means. It's a truly awful thing, to really, kind of have that understanding of things and when you really peer into that.

  Henry Rollins

  Mean, Ideas, Understanding

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I urge you to spend your youth profitably in study and virtue.... In brief, let me see in you an abyss of knowledge.

  Francois Rabelais

  Education, Youth, Study

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• As I crawled out of the abyss of combat and over the rail of the Sea Runner, I realized that compassion for the sufferings of others is a burden to those who have it. As Wilfred Owen's poem "Insensibility" puts it so well, those who feel most of others suffer most in war.

  Eugene B. Sledge

  War, Compassion, Sea

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• With undead armies, psychotic angels and exploding airships, Scar Night is a gripping, ripping yarn which rattles along at a great pace. Tether all that to the knock-out image at the heart of the novel-Deepgate, a Gothic city built on a network of chains over a great abyss-and you have urban fantasy at its best.

  Hal Duncan

  Angel, Heart, Army

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• And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?

  Marcel Proust

  Years, People, World

  Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.4472, Delphi Classics

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• The whole organization seemed to be in free fall, indulging in a collective fantasy in which experienced colleagues refused to admit that their every movement, every decision that was made and implemented, only led them one step closer to the abyss.

  Steig Larsson

  Fall, Organization, Decision

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• Abyss-mongering makes professors and poets feel daring.

  Mason Cooley

  Poetry, Professors, Daring

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• I will say that going to these meetings and things, you know, I thought that, you know, be in a room with a bunch of drunk people. Ugh! I can't do that. And the truth is, it is the cheapest therapy that you could ever get. You're in a group of people that are from all walks of life, you know. Some guy that's got, you know, construction stuff on and dust still on, to a person that's the CEO of a company. And it's a common - it's a common abyss that you shared.

  Lynda Carter

  Dust, People, Drunk

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• As you rest into stillness more profoundly, awareness becomes free of the mind's compulsive control, contractions, and identifications. Awareness naturally returns to its non-state of absolute unmanifest potential, the silent abyss beyond all knowing.

  Adyashanti

  Knowing, Mind, Return

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• The end of World War I also marked the end of bourgeois culture. An inner emptiness developed that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, paved the way for two ideologies that dragged Europe and the world into an abyss and plunged it into a catastrophe.

  Walter Kasper

  War, Two, Europe

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• The things of God are of great import; and time, and experience,and careful, and ponderous, and solemn thoughts can only find them out. Thy mind, oh man, if thou wilt lead a man unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanses of eternity; thou must commune with God!

  Joseph Smith, Jr.

  Men, Heaven, Mind

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• All world was one, one windy nothing,
  My world was christened in a stream of milk.

  Dylan Thomas

  World, Milk, Windy

  Dylan Thomas, Daniel Jones (2003). “The Poems of Dylan Thomas”, p.91, New Directions Publishing

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• Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space
  Come once a day to suffocate the sight.

  Allen Tate

  Twilight, Sight, Space

  Allen Tate (2014). “Collected Poems, 1919-1976”, p.72, Macmillan

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• Every so often, we all gaze into the abyss. It's a depressing fact of life that eventually the clock expires; eventually the sand in the hourglass runs out. It's the leaving behind of everything that matters to us that hurts the most.

  Ben Shapiro

  Running, Depressing, Hurt

  Ben Shapiro (0101). “And We All Fall Down”, p.55, Creators Publishing

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• Any media-brainwashed automaton can summon the insipid courage to peer into the horrifying abyss. But it takes a freaking genius with a fearless imagination to peer into the maw of happiness.

  Rob Brezsny

  Media, Imagination, Fearless

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• Consider in what condition both in body and soul a man should be when he is overtaken by death; and consider the shortness of life, the boundless abyss of time past and future, the feebleness of all matter.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Men, Past, Soul

  Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (2016). “Stoic Six Pack: Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Golden Sayings, Fragments and Discourses of Epictetus, Letters from a Stoic and The Enchiridion”, p.130, Enhanced Media Publishing

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• One cannot cross an abyss in two jumps.

  David Lloyd George

  Two, Crosses

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• We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.... Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Beautiful, Princess, Dragons

  Rainer Maria Rilke, “Fear Of The Inexplicable”

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• America's strength lies not in its one-ness, but in its diversity of beliefs and efforts. And it will take all our strength in the coming years to combat global warming alarmism and to keep America from falling into the totalitarian green abyss.

  Steven Milloy

  Lying, Fall, America

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