Sublime Quotes - Page 11

• It is not without trepidation that I have appropriated the codes of the Sublime and the Picturesque in my work. After all, serious photographers have spent most of this century trying to expunge such extravagances from their art. The tradition lives on, mostly in calendars and picture postcards. I was challenged to rework and revitalize that which had been so roundly denigrated.

  John Pfahl

  Art, Trying, Extravagance

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• Dear God, please reveal to us your sublime beauty, that is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, so that we will never again feel frightened.

  Francis of Assisi

  Spiritual, Dear God, Frightened

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• Revenge is a common passion; it is the sin of the uninstructed. The savage deems it noble;but the religion of Christ, which is the sublime civilizer, emphatically condemns it. Why? Because religion ever seeks to ennoble man; and nothing so debases him as revenge.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Revenge, Passion, Men

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• And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

  Donna Tartt

  Beautiful, Stars, Distance

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• It is the treating of the commonplace with the feeling of the sublime that gives to art its true power.

  Jean-Francois Millet

  Art, True Power, Giving

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• Art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully... art becomes our entree to the sublime.

  Michael Kimmelman

  Art, Clue, Entrees

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• I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty . . .

  John Keats

  Passion, Heart, Ideas

  1817 Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 Nov.

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• What a sublime idea of the infinite might of the great Architect, the Cause of all causes, the Father of all fathers, the Ens Entium! For if we would compare the Infinite, it would surely require a greater Infinite to cause the causes of effects than to produce the effects themselves.

  August Weismann

  Father, Ideas, Might

  August Weismann, Sir John Arthur Thomson, Margaret R. Thomson (1904). “The Evolution Theory”

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• No words will ever describe the exquisite beauty and charm of this mountain park – Nature’s landscape garden at once tenderly beautiful and sublime. No wonder it draws nature-lovers from all over the world.

  John Muir

  Beautiful, Garden, Mountain

  John Muir (1997). “Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, My First Summer in the Sierra, the Mountains of California, Stickeen, Selected Essays”, p.275, Library of America

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• Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little window-sill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National parks — the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc. — Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world.

  John Muir

  Beauty, Nature, Cheer

  John Muir (1997). “Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, My First Summer in the Sierra, the Mountains of California, Stickeen, Selected Essays”, p.814, Library of America

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• To make a happy fireside clime
  To weans and wife,
  That's the true pathos and sublime
  Of human life.

  Robert Burns

  Life, Home, Wife

  Robert Burns (1852). “The life and works of Robert Burns, ed. by R. Chambers”, p.78

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• All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Secret, Stories

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• All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.

  Unknown

  Atheist, Ignorant, Religion

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• A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificiant by and by. The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work.

  Mark Twain

  Zero, Hard Work, Men

  Mark Twain (2016). “A Tramp Abroad”, p.280, Xist Publishing

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• Here about the beach I wandered, nourishing a youth sublime
  With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Beach, Science, Long

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson (2014). “Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Selected Poetry: A Broadview Anthology of British Literature Edition”, p.76, Broadview Press

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• Master your breath, let the self be in bliss, contemplate on the sublime within you.

  Tirumalai Krishnamacharya

  Yoga, Self, Bliss

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• Beauty and happiness and life are all the same and they are pervasive, unattached and abstract and they are our only concern. They are immeasurable, completely lacking in substance. They are perfect and sublime. This is the subject matter of art.

  Agnes Martin

  Art, Perfect, Substance

  Agnes Martin (2005). “Schriften”, Cantz

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• When a critic knows what she or he is looking at and writes revealingly about it, it's sublime.

  Charles Saatchi

  Writing, Critics, Knows

  Charles Saatchi (2009). “My Name is Charles Saatchi and I Am an Artoholic”, Phaidon Press

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• For One in such a lofty position to stoop so low is a marvel that is staggering. What sublime humility and humble sublimeness, that the Lord of the Universe, the Divine Son of God, should stoop as to hide Himself under the appearance of bread for our salvation! Behold the humble way of God, my brothers. Therefore, do not hold yourselves to be anything of yourselves, so that you may be entirely acceptable to One Who gives Himself entirely to you.

  Francis of Assisi

  Brother, Humility, Humble

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• The true Way is sublime. It can't be expressed in language. Of what use are scriptures? But someone who sees his own nature finds the Way, even if he can't read a word.

  Bodhidharma

  Use, Way, Scripture

  Bodhidharma (2009). “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, p.29, Macmillan

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• From one sublime genius-NEWTON-more light has proceeded than the labour of a thousand years preceding had been able to produce.

  Justus von Liebig

  Science, Light, Years

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• It is regrettable that a Dostoyevsky did not live near this most interesting of all decadents (Jesus Christ) - I mean someone who would have known how to sense the very stirring charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sickly, and the childlike.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Jesus, Mean, Interesting

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• The sublime in art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Art, Expression, Infinite

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• Eloquence is to the sublime what the whole is to the part.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Eloquence, Whole

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• The weak are not a noble breed. Their sublime deeds of faith, daring, and self-sacrifice usually spring from questionable motives. The weak hate not wickedness but weakness; and one instance of their hatred of weakness is hatred of self. All the passionate pursuits of the weak are in some degree a striving to escape, blur, or disguise an unwanted self. It is a striving shot through with malice, envy, self-deception, and a host of petty impulses; yet it often culminates in superb achievements.

  Eric Hoffer

  Hate, Spring, Sacrifice

  Eric Hoffer (1963). “The Ordeal of Change”

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