Abyss Quotes - Page 14

• 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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• My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies, it is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter warders sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you. I have had moments when I thought it would be wise to separate. Ah! Moments of weakness and madness! Now I see that would have mutilated my life, ruined my art, broken the musical chords which make a perfect soul. Even covered with mud I shall praise you, from the deepest abysses I shall cry to you. In my solitude you will be with me.

  Oscar Wilde

  Wise, Sweet, Art

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• Idleness is the grand Pacific Ocean of life, and in that stagnant abyss the most salutary things produce no good, the most noxious no evil. Vice, indeed, abstractedly considered, may be, and often is engendered in idleness; but the moment it becomes efficiently vice, it must quit its cradle and cease to be idle.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Ocean, Often Is, Evil

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.312

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• The universe is a philosophical abyss.

  Kedar Joshi

  God, Philosophy, Philosophical

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• We are surrounded by abysses, but the greatest of all depths is in our own heart, and an irresistible leaning leads us there. Draw thyself from thyself!

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Heart, Temptation, Depth

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• To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.

  William James

  Faith, Doubt, Leap

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• God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Mirrors, Sea, Sky

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• A book may lie dormant for fifty years or for two thousand years in a forgotten corner of a library, only to reveal, upon being opened, the marvels or the abysses that it contains, or the line that seems to have been written for me alone. In this respect the writer is not different from any other human being: whatever we say or do can have far-reaching consequences.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Lying, Book, Years

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• Democratic Rep. Charles Schumer of New York made a plea to Livingston, the incoming speaker. These new hearings, these new subpoenas wave a red flag that common sense and common wisdom are not welcome here, .. Mr. Livingston, this may be the first and most important task you will ever face as speaker. Lead us out of this abyss.

  Charles Schumer

  New York, Red Flags, Common Sense

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• There is no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest parts of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide.

  Rachel Carson

  Nature, Ocean, Water

  Rachel Carson (1989). “The Sea Around Us”, p.149, Oxford University Press, USA

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• I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

  Frank Church

  Country, Technology, Agency

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• Silence comes in two varieties: One that nourishes and comforts; another that chokes, smothers, and isolates. Solitary confinement is the worst kind of imprisonment we can inflict on fellow humans, and if you are forced to keep silent about some dark secret, you live in solitary confinement. Without the bridge of communication connecting you to other human beings, you can’t share your burdens, can’t receive comfort, can’t confirm that you still belong. Silence is the abyss that separates you from hope.

  Martha Beck

  Communication, Dark, Bridges

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• He who is not a bird should not build his nest over abysses.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Bird, Nests, Should

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.137, Penguin

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• Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!
  Against stupidity the very gods
  Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,
  Resplendent daughter of the head divine,
  Wise foundress of the system of the world,
  Guide of the stars, who are thou then, if thou,
  Bound to the tail of folly's uncurb'd steed,
  Must, vainly shrieking, with the drunken crowd,
  Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Death, Wise, Daughter

  Friedrich Schiller (1861). “Schiller's Complete Works”, p.435

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• I'd gazed into the abyss and the abyss had gazed back, just like Daddy always said it would: You want to know about life, Mac? It's simple. Keep watching rainbows, baby. Keep looking at the sky. You find what you look for. If you go hunting good in the world, you'll find it. If you go hunting evil . . . well, don't.

  Karen Marie Moning

  Baby, Hunting, Simple

  Karen Marie Moning (2016). “The Fever Series 7-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever, Iced, Burned”, p.443, Dell

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• At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction . . . and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Men, Self, Might

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• You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Inspiring, Tired, July

  Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Speech at MIA Mass Meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, kinginstitute.stanford.edu. December 5, 1955.

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• The mathematical giant [Gauss], who from his lofty heights embraces in one view the stars and the abysses.

  Farkas Bolyai

  Stars, Science, Views

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• When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings.

  Charles Dickens

  Nature, Sight, Sea

  Charles Dickens (1850). “Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observations of David Copperfield the Younger”, p.253

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• A duplicitous country with a duplicitous leadership is going to give us more duplicity. And that duplicity is going lead us off an abyss. That's going to happen.

  Matt Shea

  Inspiring, Country, Duplicity

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• Even when our life is most difficult, it is important to remember that something within us is keeping us alive- the life force-that lift us, energizes us, pulls us back sometimes from the abyss of despair. True spirituality does not exist without love of life.

  Nathaniel Branden

  Love Life, Important, Despair

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• If you're not willing to face the abyss of choice, you will almost certainly not spend enough time dancing with opportunity.

  Seth Godin

  Opportunity, Dancing, Choices

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• Every work of art reaches man in his inner powers. It reaches him more profoundly and insidiously than any rational proposition, either cogent demonstration or sophistry. For it strikes him with two terrible weapons, Intuition and Beauty, and at the single root in him of all his energies... Art and Poetry awaken the dreams of man, and his longings, and reveal to him some of the abysses he has in himself.

  Jacques Maritain

  Dream, Art, Men

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• If you call [the synagogue] a brothel, a den of vice, the devil's refuge, Satan's fortress, a place to deprave the soul, an abyss of every conceivable disaster or whatever else you will, you are still saying less than it deserves.

  St. Jerome

  Saying Less, Soul, Devil

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• The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.

  Cesare Pavese

  Depression, Sound, Gauges

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