Profundity Quotes - Page 2

• The greatest achievements in the science of this [twentieth] century are themselves the sources of more puzzlement than human beings have ever experienced. Indeed, it is likely that the twentieth century will be looked back at as the time when science provided the first close glimpse of the profundity of human ignorance. We have not reached solutions; we have only begun to discover how to ask questions.

  Lewis Thomas

  Ignorance, Science, Achievement

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• A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can’t be how the universe works.” “In the Order we call it ‘inverse profundity.’ We’ve observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.

  Lev Grossman

  Order, Numbers, Interesting

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.533, Penguin

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• Whoever knows he is deep tries to be clear, but whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd tries to be obscure. For the crowd supposes that anything it cannot see to the bottom must be deep: it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Water, Trying, Crowds

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• Profundity easily turns into dullness and astuteness deteriorates into wit. Be guided by natural common sense and it will accommodate great and small.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Common Sense, Natural, Wit

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• People who came to the clinics or came to the fundraiser knew what was happening in their state but didn't realize the profundity of what was happening all over the place. But the third thing [was] that at every single clinic I went to, somebody who worked there - it could have been the doctor, it could have been the receptionist - said, "Thank you for coming, no one ever comes." And it broke my heart...I've used these services, I've had an abortion, I got to be where I am because of access to making choices to have the life I wanted.

  Lizz Winstead

  Heart, Doctors, People

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world.

  Virginia Woolf

  Mean, Carpe Diem, Vanity

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.618, Wordsworth Editions

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• The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Ideas, Chiaroscuro, Harbors

  Emile M. Cioran (1975). “A short history of decay”, Viking Books

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• It is only great pain--that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood--that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us 'better'--but I know that it makes us deeper.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Pain, Humanity, Doubt

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• The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum . (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Sports, Baseball, Writing

  Stephen Jay Gould (1991). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• The discipline of suffering, of great suffering- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, preserving, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness- was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Greatness, Men, Discipline

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.344, Modern Library

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• At first there is nothing, then there is a profound nothingness, after that a blue profundity.

  Yves Klein

  Blue, Profound, Firsts

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• Sometimes I try my hand at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, but I always end up with just one single word: God.

  Etty Hillesum

  God, Hands, Trying

  Etty Hillesum, K. A. D. Smelik, Arnold Pomerans (2002). “Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943”, p.640, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• Could truth perhaps be a woman who has reasons for not permitting her reasons to be seen? Could her name perhaps be--to speak Greek--Baubo?... Oh, those Greeks! They understood how to live: to do that it is necessary to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore the appearance, to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial--out of profundity!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Truth, Believe, Names

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• The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Children, Philosophical, Poetry

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• Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity.

  Matthew Arnold

  Spiritual, Men, Law

  Matthew Arnold (1875). “Essays in Criticism”, p.128, London : [s.n.]

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• A man's profundity may keep him from opening on a first interview, and his caution on a second; but I should suspect his emptiness, if he carried on his reserve to a third.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Men, Silence, May

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.350

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• Questions are not happenstance thoughts nor are questions common problems of today which one picks up from hearsay and booklearning and decks out with a gesture of profundity questions grow out of confrontation with the subject matter and the subject matter is there only where eyes are, it is in this manner that questions will be posed and all the more considering that questions that have today fallen out of fashion in the great industry of problems. One stands up for nothing more than the normal running of the industry. Philosophy interprets its corruption as the resurrection of metaphysics.

  Martin Heidegger

  Running, Fashion, Philosophy

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• We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.

  Cornel West

  Space, Vanishing, Disappear

  "Cornel West, 'Living And Loving Out Loud'". "Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. October 29, 2009.

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• I am afraid that old women are more skeptical in their most secret heart of hearts than any man: they believe in the superficiality of existence as in its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them merely a veil over this "truth," a most welcome veil over a pudendum--and so a matter of decency and modesty, and nothing else.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Women, Believe, Heart

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• When I talk of reality, I am always thinking of essentials. Profundity is not located in some remote, inaccessible region. It is rooted in everyday life.

  Antoni Tapies

  Reality, Thinking, Everyday

  "Antoni Tapies". UNESCO Courier, June 1994.

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• With its claims to profundity, boldness and originality, thinking still limits itself provisionally to the exclusively rational and scientific. ... As soon as it lays hold of the feelings, it becomes spirit.

  Robert Musil

  Thinking, Feelings, Limits

  Robert Musil, Burton Pike, David S. Luft (1995). “Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses”, p.43, University of Chicago Press

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• The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.

  Aldous Huxley

  Distance, Eye, Order

  Aldous Huxley (2002). “Complete Essays: 1939-1956”, Ivan R Dee

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• Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative. In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all exhibition of itself is painful.

  Thomas Hardy

  Exhibitions, May, Painful

  Thomas Hardy (2016). “The Return of the Native”, p.213, Thomas Hardy

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• All that is necessary to raise imbecility into what the mob regards as profundity is to lift it off the floor and put it on a platform.

  George Jean Nathan

  Stupidity, Platforms, Raises

  George Jean Nathan, Charles Angoff (1998). “The World of George Jean Nathan: Essays, Reviews, & Commentary”, Hal Leonard Corporation

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• I'm glad that so many of Donald Pease's unique and revealing insights on Dr. Seuss--observations he shared with me on camera with an effusiveness and profundity quite unmatched--have found their way into book form. No one tells these tales of young Ted, Mr. Geisel, and Dr. Seuss, and makes the connections between the three of them, quite like Dr. Pease.

  Ron Lamothe

  Book, Unique, Cameras

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