Profound Quotes - Page 7

• Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.

  Andre Gide

  Optimism, Sides

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• And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future, And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn'd to beautiful results, And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death, And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact, And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.

  Walt Whitman

  Beautiful, Perfect, Miracle

  Walt Whitman (1991). “Selected Poems”, p.8, Courier Corporation

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• To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Eye, Might, Ends

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2010). “The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs”, p.198, Vintage

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• ...I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.— Let each man hope & believe what he can.—

  Charles Darwin

  Dog, Believe, Knowledge

  Charles Darwin, Frederick Burkhardt (1993). “The Correspondence of Charles Darwin:”, p.224, Cambridge University Press

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• An humble man without learning, but filled with the Holy Spirit, is more powerful than the most nobly-born profound scholar without that inspiration. He who is educated by the Divine Spirit can, in his time, lead others to receive the same Spirit.

  Abdu'l-Bahá

  Powerful, Inspiration, Humble

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• If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children.

  Confucius

  Inspiring, Children, Years

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• ... the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.

  Michael Pollan

  Mind, Culture, Engagement

  Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.11, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but if we and our posterity neglect its instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity.

  Daniel Webster

  Bible, Country, Men

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• In the first place, [his eyes] never laughed when he laughed. Have you ever noticed this peculiarity some people have? It is either the sign of an evil nature or of a profound and lasting sorrow.

  Mikhail Lermontov

  Eye, Evil, People

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• It's a fairly accurate portrait of me at eighteen, minus a few quirks like reckless driving and eating binges. It's accurate but it isn't profound.

  Susanna Kaysen

  Portraits, Driving, Eating

  Susanna Kaysen (2013). “Girl, Interrupted”, p.150, Vintage

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• Adam is crying and somewhere inside of me I am crying, too, because I'm feeling things at last. I'm feeling not just the physical pain, but all that I have lost, and it is profound and catastrophic and will leave a crater in me that nothing will ever fill.

  Gayle Forman

  Pain, Loss, Feelings

  Gayle Forman (2009). “If I Stay”, p.111, Penguin

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• There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tiny bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice.

  Toni Morrison

  Children, Loneliness, Sea

  Toni Morrison (1987). “Sula”

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• Each day is a miracle that intoxicates me. I want more. I greet every morning like a new pleasure. And yet I am keenly aware of all life's artifices. Getting dressed, wearing make-up, laughing, having fun-isn't all that just playing a role? Am I not more profound, carrying the burden of those twenty years when I 'wasn't alive', than all those who rushed around in vain during that time?

  Malika Oufkir

  Morning, Fun, Years

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• I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Taken, Eye, Two

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2002). “F. Scott Fitzgerald: Trimalchio: An Early Version of 'The Great Gatsby'”, p.40, Cambridge University Press

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• No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one's own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Unique, Pills, Odd Things

  Frederick K. Goodwin, Kay Redfield Jamison (2007). “Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression”, p.869, Oxford University Press

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• Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit. And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.

  Andrew Sullivan

  Fashion, Responsibility, Animal

  "The Abolition Of Torture". newrepublic.com. December 19, 2005.

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• But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

  Michel Foucault

  Real, Philosophical, Exercise

  "Discipline and Punish". Book by Michel Foucault, 1977.

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• What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child. From, The Book of Disquiet

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Children, Book

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• We must eschew anything trivial. We must embrace all that is frivolous.... Trivial things take up all your time and dull your senses, whereas frivolity is meaningful, profound, worth living and dying for.... If we devote our lives to frivolity, the world will be a far, far better place. Humanity will be better able to fulfill its primary goal, that of having a good time.

  Cynthia Heimel

  Meaningful, Goal, Humanity

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• What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.

  Dallas Willard

  Stupid, Mean, Upside Down

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• Whatever will happen will happen, but choose your companions with care. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them. Otherwise you will not be able to bear their company for very long.

  Anne Rice

  Voice, Long, Secret

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• Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute...All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road...and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us.

  Victor Hugo

  Horse, Journey, Hands

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• The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Mistake, Lying, Soul

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History”, p.199, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

  Virginia Woolf

  Sight, Long, Mind

  Virginia Woolf (1983). “To the lighthouse: the original holograph draft”, Chatto & Windus

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• Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression "a place in the sun" first come from? My rational thought process cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate.

  Frances Mayes

  Fate, Expression, Blood

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