Light Quotes - Page 19

• Oh! grief is fantastic; it weaves a web on which to trace the history of its woe from every form and change around; it incorporates itself with all living nature; it finds sustenance in every object; as light, it fills all things, and, like light, it gives its own colors to all.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Grief, Color, Giving

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1826). “The last man, by the author of Frankenstein”, p.197

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• idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Distance, Passion, White

  Ellen Glasgow (1900). “The Descendant”

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• 1. Always wait between books for the springs to fill up and flow over. 2. Always preserve within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries. 3. Always, and as far as it is possible, endeavor to touch life on every side; but keep the central vision of the mind, the inmost light, untouched and untouchable.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Spring, Book, Waiting

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• One naked star has waded through
  The purple shallows of the night,
  And faltering as falls the dew
  It drips its misty light.

  James Whitcomb Riley

  Stars, Fall, Night

  James Whitcomb Riley (1993). “The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley”, p.147, Indiana University Press

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• A well ordered society would be one where the State only had a negative action, comparable to that of a rudder: a light pressure at the right moment to counteract the first suggestion of any loss of equilibrium.

  Simone Weil

  Loss, Suggestions, Negative

  Simone Weil (2002). “Gravity and Grace”, p.172, Psychology Press

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• Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry.

  Simone Weil

  Needs, Bread, Eternity

  Simone Weil (2002). “Gravity and Grace”, p.180, Psychology Press

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• Often I have found that the one thing that can save is the thing which appears most to threaten ... one has to go down into what one most fears and in that process ... comes a saving flicker of light and energy that, even if it does not produce the courage of a hero, at any rate enables a trembling mortal to take one step further.

  Laurens van der Post

  Hero, Steps, Energy

  Laurens Van Der Post (1994). “Feather Fall: An Anthology”, Hodder & Stoughton

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• Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

  Iris Murdoch

  Art, Cozy, Matter

  Iris Murdoch (1999). “A Severed Head, The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea”

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• We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.

  Iris Murdoch

  Self, Secret, Satisfaction

  Iris Murdoch (1999). “A Severed Head, The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea”

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• Not that the moderns are born with more wit than their predecessors, but, finding the world better furnished at their coming into it, they have more leisure for new thoughts, more light to direct them, and more hints to work upon.

  Jeremy Collier

  Culture, Hints, World

  Jeremy Collier (1728). “Essays upon several moral subjects”, p.70

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• One can never be too rich or too thin' is an aphorism attributed to the Duchess of Windsor. Being both rich and thin is a difficult enterprise, indeed almost unprecedented as an ideal. Into the paradoxical gap between the capacity to spend money and the need to eat less steps a brilliant solution: 'light' food. In buying 'light' food we can pay more for what costs less to produce in the first place.

  Margaret Visser

  Needs, Cost, Pay

  Margaret Visser (2010). “Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea”, p.109, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• There is also an evil report; light, indeed, and easy to raise, but difficult to carry, and still more difficult to get rid of.

  Hesiod

  Evil, Nicknames, Easy

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• Imagination comes from yourself and can deceive you, but vision is a gift from outside yourself - like light striking on your closed eyelids and lifting them to see what's really there.

  Elizabeth Goudge

  Imagination, Vision, Deceiving

  Elizabeth Goudge (1948). “Pilgrim's Inn”

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• A dogmatical spirit inclines a man to be censorious of his neighbors. Every one of his opinions appears to him written, as it were, with sunbeams, and he grows angry that his neighbors do not see it in the same light. He is tempted to disdain his correspondents as men of low and dark understandings because they do not believe what he does.

  Isaac Watts

  Believe, Dark, Men

  Isaac Watts, Joseph Emerson (1855). “The Improvement of the Mind”, p.29

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• Poesy and oratory omit things not essential, and insert little beautiful digressions, in order to place everything in the most effective light.

  Isaac Watts

  Beautiful, Order, Essentials

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• For some of us, the soul is resident in the sole, and yearns ceaselessly for light and air and self-expression. Our feet are our very selves. The touch of floor or carpet, grass or mud or asphalt, speaks to us loud and clear from the foot, that scorned and lowly organ as dear to us as our eyes and ears.

  Barbara Holland

  Eye, Feet, Air

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• The secret heart is fair devotion's temple; there the saint, even on that living altar, lights the flame of purest sacrifice, which burns unseen, not unaccepted.

  Hannah More

  Heart, Sacrifice, Flames

  Hannah More (1827). “Sacred Drams: The Search After Happiness, A. Other Poems”, p.104

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• I love to praise what I love, and I won't for a minute believe that love is blind -- indeed, it gives clearness without sharpness, and surely that is the best light in which to look at anything.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Believe, Love Is, Giving

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• The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy.

  Patricia Hampl

  Substance, Golden, Study

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• Men look to the East for the dawning things, for the light of a raising sun
  But they look to the West, to the crimson West, for the things that are done, are done.

  Douglas Malloch

  Character, Men, East

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• A Gothic building engenders true religion ... The light, falling through colored glass, the singular forms of the architecture, unite to give a silent image of that infinite mystery which the soul for ever feels, and never comprehends.

  Madame de Stael

  Fall, Glasses, Giving

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• Stars veil their beauty soon / Beside the glorious moon, / When her full silver light / Doth make the whole earth bright.

  Sappho

  Stars, Moon, Veils

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• He who recognizes no higher logic than that of the shilling may become a very rich man, and yet remain all the while an exceedingly poor creature; for riches are no proof whatever of moral worth, and their glitter often serves only to draw attention to the worthlessness of their possessor, as the glow-worm's light reveals the grub.

  Samuel Smiles

  Men, Attention, Glitter

  Samuel Smiles (1871). “Self-help: With Illustrations of Characters, Conduct, and Perseverance”, p.341

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• Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion--the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater, the passion for making them all prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindly masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light.

  Matthew Arnold

  Hate, Passion, Men

  Matthew Arnold (2013). “Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (Illustrated)”, p.790, Delphi Classics

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• It does not try to reach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords of its own. It seeks to away with classes, to make the best that has been taught and known in the world current everywhere, to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely--nourished, and not bound by them.

  Matthew Arnold

  Winning, Men, Class

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