Sublime Quotes

• Know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Strength, Strong, Grief

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1849). “The Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ; Complete in One Volume”, p.10

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• Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Sex, Seduction, Command

  Jean Baudrillard (1990). “Seduction”

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• Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt

  Immanuel Kant

  Beautiful, Pain, Mind

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• Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything, will really do.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Action, Economics

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• Nature conceals her secrets because she is sublime, not because she is a trickster.

  Albert Einstein

  Nature, Secret, Tricksters

  Letter to Oscar Veblen, 30 Apr. 1930

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• To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.

  Eleanor Catton

  Views, Language, Natural

  "The land of the long white cloud" by Eleanor Catton, www.theguardian.com. October 17, 2013.

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• Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.

  John Ruskin

  Greatness, Space, Mind

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• One source of the sublime is infinity.

  Edmund Burke

  Infinity, Source

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• Melancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime.

  Immanuel Kant

  Melancholy, Superb

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• Live your life in a sublime spirit of confidence and determination.

  Neville Goddard

  Determination, Live Your Life, Spirit

  Neville Goddard “Neville's Spiritual Classics”, Lulu.com

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• The most sublime act is to set another before you.

  William Blake

  Sacrifice, Self Sacrifice

  William Blake, David Fuller (2000). “William Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose”, p.316, Pearson Education

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• The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was 'sublime and beautiful,'the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Beautiful, Goodness, Conscious

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• People of this world are deluded. They're always longing for something, always, in a word, seeking. But the wise wake up. They choose reason over custom. They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons.

  Bodhidharma

  Wise, People, Mind

  Bodhidharma (2009). “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, p.5, Macmillan

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• A scrap of knowledge about sublime things is worth more than any amount about trivialities.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Triviality, Scrap, Amount

  Saint Thomas (Aquinas) (1955). “Theological texts”

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• Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Beauty, Literature, Attractive

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• There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Steps, Ridiculous, Ridicule

  Quoted in D. G. De Pradt, Histoire de l'Ambassade dans le Grand-Duche de Varsovie en 1812 (1815) See Thomas Paine 30; Warton 1

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• Mountains had taken the place of religion, had satisfied her religious sense, her need for adoration and worship as no service in any Cathedral, however sublime, had been able to do.

  Ann Bridge

  Religious, Taken, Mountain

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• I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

  Socrates

  Inspiration, Writing, Mean

  "Apology" by Plato (sct. 21),

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• Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling... When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience.

  Edmund Burke

  Pain, Ideas, Giving

  "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful". Treatise by Edmund Burke, www.bartleby.com. 1757.

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• People talk about Frank Sinatra all the time - and they should talk about Frank - but he had the greatest arrangers. They worked for him in a different kind of way than they worked for other people. They gave him arrangements that are just sublime on every level. And he, of course, could match that because he had this ability to get inside of the song in a sort of a conversational way. Frank sang to you, not at you, like so many pop singers today. Even singers of standards.

  Bob Dylan

  Song, People, Different

  "Bob Dylan: 'Passion is a young man's game, older people gotta be wise'". Interview with Robert Love, www.independent.co.uk. February 7, 2015.

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• Rest not. Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Inspirational, Life, Time

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• If you're at the sink washing the cup, wash the cup. Don't worry about everything else. ... We forget to appreciate the simplest moments of the day, the sublime in the ordinary.

  Julia Roberts

  Appreciate, Worry, Ordinary

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• Sometimes I feel quite distinctly that what is inside me is not all of me. There is something else, sublime, quite indestructible, some tiny fragment of the Universal spirit.Don't you feel that?

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Tiny, Spirit, Sometimes

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1991). “Cancer Ward: A Novel”, p.584, Macmillan

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• The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination.

  Bryant H. McGill

  Reality, Imagination, Design

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• Onward and sublime
  Will ever glide
  The silent stream of Time,
  That bears us on its tide.

  Harvey Rice

  Time, Tides, Bears

  Harvey Rice (1864). “Mount Vernon, and other poems ... Second edition”, p.22

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