Brightness Quotes - Page 4

• He wondered how he could ever have thought of the planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.

  C. S. Lewis

  Reality, Islands, Air

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• I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.

  Charles Dickens

  Flower, Eye, Scary

  Charles Dickens (1881). “Great Expectations”, p.78

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• His form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appear'd Less than archangel ruin'd, and th' excess Of glory obscur'd.

  John Milton

  Excess, Ruins, Losing

  John Milton, John Richardson Major (1853). “Milton's Paradise Lost, with notes, critical and explanatory, original and selected, by J. R. Major”, p.42

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• Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

  Blaise Cendrars

  Eye, Writing, Light

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• Good temper, like a sunny day, sheds a ray of brightness over everything; it is the sweetener of toil and the soother of disquietude!

  Washington Irving

  Rays, Toil, Sunny Day

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• I have seen the sun break through
  to illuminate a small field
  for a while, and gone my way
  and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
  of great price, the one field that had
  treasure in it. I realize now
  that I must give all that I have
  to possess it. Life is not hurrying
  on to a receeding future, nor hankering after
  an imagined past. It is the turning
  aside like Moses to the miracle
  of the lit bush, to a brightness
  that seemed as transitory as your youth
  once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

  R. S. Thomas

  Past, Break Through, Giving

  R.S. Thomas (2012). “R. S. Thomas: Everyman Poetry: Everyman's Poetry”, p.96, Hachette UK

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• In the particular presence of memorable language we can find a reminder of our ability to know and retain knowledge itself: the brightness wherein all things come to see.

  Robert Pinsky

  Memorable, Language, Reminders

  Robert Pinsky (2014). “The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide”, p.116, Macmillan

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• It dawned on me with blinding brightness. I realized: I had jumped into another rare kind of stratosphere - one that only a handful of people in every generation are lucky enough to know.

  Jesse Owens

  Sports, Athlete, People

  Jesse Owens, Paul G. Neimark (1978). “Jesse, a spiritual autobiography”

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• The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature-of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter-such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Summer, Nature, Cheer

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.84, Simon and Schuster

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• In the stillness of the night, the Goddess whispers. In the brightness of the day, dear God roars. Life pulses, mind imagines, emotions wave, thoughts wander. What are all these but the endless movements of One Taste, forever at play with its own gestures, whispering quietly to all who would listen: is this not yourself? When the thunder roars, do you not hear your Self? When the lightning cracks, do you not see your Self? When clouds float quietly across the sky, is this not your own limitless Being, waving back at you?

  Ken Wilber

  Night, Sky, Play

  Ken Wilber (1998). “The Essential Ken Wilber”, p.34, Shambhala Publications

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• The apparent world, the one which is perceived, with its figures, its brightness, its colors, is a psychical product, a creation of the observer. The figures seen on the vault of heaven are neither the celestial bodies, nor the true clouds or the falling stars, but are only effigies which the observer's psyche has created and localized how and where it can.

  Vasco Ronchi

  Stars, Fall, Clouds

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• You must rise above
  The gloomy clouds
  Covering the mountaintop
  Otherwise, how will you
  Ever see the brightness?

  Ryokan Taigu

  Clouds, Covering, Rise Above

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• On the darkest days you have to search for a spot of brightness, on the coldest days you have to seek out a spot of warmth; on the bleakest days you have to keep your eyes onward and upward and on the saddest days you have to leave them open to let them cry. To then let them dry. To give them a chance to wash out the pain in order to see fresh and clear once again.

  Tahereh Mafi

  Pain, Inspiration, Eye

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• A straight line can readily be drawn among each of the two series of points corresponding to the maxima and minima, thus showing that there is a simple relation between the brightness of the variables and their periods.

  Henrietta Swan Leavitt

  Stars, Simple, Two

  "Periods of 25 Variable Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud". Harvard College Observatory Circular, vol. 173, (pp. 1-3), 1912.

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• God's glory is the created brightness that surrounds God’s revelation of himself.

  Wayne Grudem

  Glory, Revelations, Surround

  Wayne A. Grudem (2009). “Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine”, p.200, Harper Collins

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• I must say this now about that first fire. It was magic. Out of dead tinder and grass and sticks came a live warm light. It cracked and snapped and smoked and filled the woods with brightness. It lighted the trees and made them warm and friendly. It stood tall and bright and held back the night.

  Jean Craighead George

  Night, Fire, Light

  Jean Craighead George (1991). “My side of the mountain”

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• A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Summer, Memories, Reality

  Vladimir Nabokov (2012). “Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited”, p.57, Penguin UK

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• All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?

  Bertrand Russell

  Inspiration, Age, Genius

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• It is not so much light that falls over the world extended by your body its suffocating snow, as brightness, pouring itself out of you, as if you were burning inside. Under your skin the moon is alive.

  Pablo Neruda

  Fall, Moon, Light

  Pablo Neruda, “Ode To A Naked Beauty”

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• No matter how dark the room gets I can always see. It looks emptier when I put the lights on so I don't do it if I can help it. Brightness disagrees with me: it hurts my eyes, wastes electricity and encourages moths, all sorts of things. I sit in the dark for a number of reasons.

  Janice Galloway

  Hurt, Eye, Dark

  Janice Galloway (1989). “The Trick is to Keep Breathing: A Novel”

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• History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.

  James F. Cooper

  Love, Hero, History

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• Money refused loose its brightness.

  George Herbert

  Refuse

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• God, how pointless and empty the world is! Days filled with cheap and tarnished moments succeed each other, restless and haunted nights follow in bitter routine: the sun shines without brightness, and the moon rises without light. My heart has the taste of ashes, and my throat is tight and weary with weeping. What is a lost soul? It is one that has turned from its true path and is groping in the darkness of remembered ways—

  Malcolm Lowry

  Heart, Moon, Night

  Malcolm Lowry (2015). “The 1940 Under the Volcano: A Critical Edition”, p.306, University of Ottawa Press

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• The first thing I did when I got inside was turn on the kitchen light. Then I moved to the table, putting my dad's iPod on the speaker dock, and a Bob Dylan song came on, the notes familiar. I went into the living room, hitting the switch there, then down the hallway to my room, where I did the same. It was amazing what a little noise and brightness could do to a house and a life, how much the smallest bit of each could change everything. After all these years of just passing through, I was beginning to finally feel at home.

  Sarah Dessen

  Song, Dad, Home

  "What Happened To Goodbye". Book by Sarah Dessen, May 10, 2011.

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