Cathedrals Quotes - Page 7

• Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Heart, Agony, Depth

  Charles Baudelaire, Richard Howard (1983). “Les Fleurs Du Mal”, p.77, David R. Godine Publisher

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• An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man's knowledge is more of a miracle than any sticks turned to snakes, or the parting of waters!

  Jerome Lawrence

  Men, Snakes, Ideas

  "Inherit the Wind". Play by Jerome Lawrence, 1955.

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• They say that these are not the best of times, but they're the only times I've ever known. And I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own. Now I have seen that sad surrender in my lovers eyes...and I can only stand apart and sympathize...for we are only what our situations hand us...it's either sadness or euphoria.

  Billy Joel

  Believe, Sadness, Eye

  "Summer, Highland Falls". Song by Billy Joel, 1976.

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• The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain.

  Lisa St. Aubin de Terán

  Dream, Exercise, Mind

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• Each thing I do, I rush through so I can do something else. In such a way do the days pass - -a blend of stock car racing and the never ending building of a gothic cathedral. Through the windows of my speeding car I see all that I love falling away: books unread, jokes untold, landscapes unvisited.

  Stephen Dobyns

  Book, Fall, Stock Car Racing

  Stephen Dobyns, “Pursuit”

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• A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to committ outrages.

  Hermann Hesse

  Strong, Mad, Normal

  Hermann Hesse (2013). “Steppenwolf: A Novel”, p.27, Macmillan

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• Her father had taught her about hands. About a dog's paws. Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel! She would pretend disgust, but the dog's paw was a wonder: the smell of it never suggested dirt. It's a cathedral! her father had said, so-and-so's garden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen--a concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Dog, Father, Taken

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “The English Patient”, p.8, Vintage

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• In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses.

  Isaac Marion

  Mind, Ceilings, Mouths

  Isaac Marion (2012). “Warm Bodies: A Novel”, p.10, Simon and Schuster

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• It seemed she was in a cathedral—if, that is, the earth itself were to dream a cathedral into being over thousands of years of water weeping through stone.

  Laini Taylor

  Dream, Years, Water

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• Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.

  Joan Didion

  Wall, Night, Blue

  Joan Didion (2012). “Blue Nights (Enhanced Edition)”, p.134, Knopf

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• Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.

  Anatoli Boukreev

  Ambition, Climbing, Practice

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• Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move.

  Bob Dylan

  Beautiful, Art, Moving

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• To write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral. There, one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help; on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Writing, Ambition, Blood

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• Photography is all about capturing a mood, a feeling. I feel a special connection with nature, often very powerful. This late afternoon was phenomenal. Standing on the edge of the ocean, I gasped in awe as the holy light illuminated this cathedral window. Witnessing such a moment and capturing it is what I live for. Mother Nature is so powerful, I never underestimate Her.

  Peter Lik

  Photography, Mother, Nature

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• All great cathedrals began their building by the placement of a single stone. The building unit of a great society is the individual.

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Stones, Building, Individual

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• I'm not a preacher, and I'm certainly not a good example, but I have my own feelings about God. I'm kind of a nature guy. My cathedral is forests, or the prairies, or the beach.

  Neil Young

  Beach, Guy, Feelings

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• Italy valued cathedrals while Spain valued explorers. So worldwide, five times as many people speak Spanish than Italian.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Atheist, Italian, People

  Twitter post from Oct 11, 2010

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• Indeed Christianity passes. Passes - it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea urchin and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits.

  H. G. Wells

  Beach, Heart, Men

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• The library is my cathedral.

  Barbara Bretton

  Library

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• You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I'm the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colours there hides the final cataclysm.

  Mark Rothko

  Thinking, Finals, Looks

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• If theory is the role of the architect, then such beautiful proofs are the role of the craftsman. Of course, as with the great renaissance artists, such roles are not mutually exclusive. A great cathedral has both structural impressiveness and delicate detail. A great mathematical theory should similarly be beautiful on both large and small scales.

  Michael Atiyah

  Beauty, Beautiful, Art

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• Armstrong, sitting in the commander's seat, spacesuit on, helmet on, plugged into electrical and environmental umbilical's, is a man who is not only a machine himself in the links of these networks, but is also a man sitting in (what Collins is later to call) a 'mini-cathedral.' a man somewhat more than a pilot, somewhat more than a superpilot, is in fact a veritable high priest of the forces of society and scientific history concentrated in that mini cathedral, a general of the church of the forces of technology.

  Norman Mailer

  Technology, Men, Church

  "A Fire on the Moon".

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• Every generation has its war. I have just been reminded of mine. It ended in 1989, 43 years after it began, the longest war Britain fought and certainly the most expensive. Its climax was total victory. Yet there was no parade, no medals, no colours hung in cathedrals. The Cold War saw no battles and cost almost no blood. Where there is no blood there is no glory and hence no history. Asked What did you do in the war, Daddy?, I could say only that I paid my taxes and left it at that.

  Simon Jenkins

  War, Blood, Years

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• [Rumi] is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity... like the sense you might get walking into a cathedral.

  Coleman Barks

  True Identity, Trying, Vastness

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• At noon I feel as though I could devour all the elephants of Hindostan, and then pick my teeth with the spire of Strasburg cathedral; in the evening I become so sentimental that I would fain drink up the Milky Way without reflecting how indigestible I should find the little fixed stars, and by night there is the Devil himself broke loose in my head and no mistake.

  Heinrich Heine

  Stars, Mistake, Night

  Heinrich Heine (1882). “Heinrich Heine's Pictures of Travel”

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