Top 100 Lofty Quotes
#1. A good library is a place, a palace where the lofty spirits of all nations and generations meet.
Shmuel Niger
#2. The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time. The widest excursions of the mind are made by short flights frequently repeated; the most lofty fabrics of science are formed by the continued accumulation of single propositions.
Samuel Johnson
#3. Thought can be lofty without being elegant, but to the extent it lacks elegance it will have less effect on others. Force without finesse is mere mass.
Fernando Pessoa
#4. When I write, I'm looking to turn you on and tell a good story. No more, no less. No lofty goals here.
Kirsten McCurran
#6. Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become.
John Ruskin
#7. Have the courage to analyze great emotions to create characters who shall be lofty and true. The whole art of the analytical novel lies there.
Paul Bourget
#8. And his brow was lofty with thought, and his eye wild with care; and, in the few furrows upon his cheek I read the fables of sorrow, and weariness, and disgust with mankind, and a longing after solitude.
Edgar Allan Poe
#9. The desire to change the world is a tremendous advantage as you travel down the difficult path ahead because focusing on a lofty goal is more energizing and attracts more talent than simply making a buck.
Guy Kawasaki
#10. People were the same everywhere, no matter what lofty vows they proclaimed. Help was given only in the hope of its being reciprocated. Expectations of reward lurked behind every act of altruism.
Steven Erikson
#11. Landscapes have a language of their own, expressing the soul of the things, lofty or humble, which constitute them, from the mighty peaks to the smallest of the tiny flowers hidden in the meadow's grass.
Alexandra David-Neel
#12. Behold the threaden sails,
Borne with the invisible and creeping wind,
Draw the huge bottoms through the furrow'd sea,
Breasting the lofty surge
William Shakespeare
#13. I am as one
Who doth attempt some lofty mountain's height,
And having gained what to the upcast eye
The summit's point appear'd, astonished sees
Its cloudy top, majestic and enlarged,
Towering aloft, as distant as before.
Joanna Baillie
#14. Let us show, not merely in great crises, but in every day of life, qualities of practical intelligence, of hardihood and endurance, and above all, the power of devotion to a lofty ideal.
Theodore Roosevelt
#15. No free government can stand without virtue in the people, and a lofty spirit of partiotism.
Andrew Jackson
#16. it is quite impossible for us men clothed about with this dense covering of flesh to understand or speak of the divine and lofty and immaterial energies of the Godhead, except by the use of images and types and symbols derived from our own life(7).
John Damascene
#17. My dad taught me that to be a writer is a decision and a habit. It's not anything lofty, and it doesn't have that much to do with inspiration. You have to develop the habit of being a certain way with yourself. You do it at the debt of honor.
Anne Lamott
#18. Wheresoever thou findest a high mountain or a lofty hill and a green tree, know that an idol is there!
Akiva Ben Joseph
#19. Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.
Pope Francis
#20. What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in serious music.
Dmitri Shostakovich
#21. Having made this rather lofty comparison I am less uneasy in calling attention to the existence of low people by whose interference, however little we may like it, the course of the world is very much determined. It
George Eliot
#22. I'm really just trying ... to write what feels true to me. I don't think about a lofty responsibility. I think I'd be paralyzed by that. Like any of my male colleagues, I'm writing the stories that interest me in a way that feels true to me.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
#23. I think of myself as an engineer, not as a visionary or 'big thinker.' I don't have any lofty goals.
Linus Torvalds
#24. Black and white are nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we try to judge things, and map out our place in the world relevance to them.
Karen Marie Moning
#25. Poetry is a solitary process. One does not write poetry for the masses. Poetry is a self-involved, lofty pursuit. Songs are for the people. When I'm writing a song, I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It's a different aspect of communication. It's for the people.
Patti Smith
#26. It is sparkling light, aromatic plants, a lofty palace, a flowing river, ripe fruit, a beautiful wife and abundant clothing, in an eternal abode of radiant joy, in beautiful soundly-constructed high houses.
Muhammad
#27. The poet is a bird of strange moods. He descends from his lofty domain to tarry among us, singing; if we do not honor him he will unfold his wings and fly back to his dwelling place.
Khalil Gibran
#28. The art of saying well what one thinks is different from the faculty of thinking. The latter may be very deep and lofty and far- reaching, while the former is altogether wanting.
Joseph Joubert
#29. When you drive, you are doing several things at once. You are using your eyes, ears, hands, your mind. If you have meditated for many years and have reached a lofty height in your meditation, as I have, you can meditate while running and cycling and painting.
Sri Chinmoy
#30. No one is born with good character; it's not a hereditary trait. And it isn't determined by a single noble act. Character is established by conscientious adherence to moral values, not by lofty rhetoric or good intentions.
Michael Josephson
#31. If ardent passions push not men on to lofty enterprise, calm wisdom never will accomplish it.
Vittorio Alfieri
#32. We are of a broad, Karamazovian nature
and this is what I am driving at
capable of containing all possible opposites and of contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, an abyss of lofty ideals, and the abyss beneath us, and abyss of the lowest and foulest degradation.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#33. Poverty is dishonorable, not in itself, but when it is a proof of laziness, intemperance, luxury, and carelessness; whereas in a person that is temperate, industrious, just and valiant, and who uses all his virtues for the public good, it shows a great and lofty mind.
Plutarch
#34. From a lofty perch Tarzan viewed the village of thatched huts across the intervening plantation.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#35. We seek to sow life in the child rather than theories, to help him in his growth, mental and emotional as well as physical, and for that we must offer grand and lofty ideas to the human mind,
Maria Montessori
#36. A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.
Floyd Skloot
#37. People go to admire lofty mountains, and huge breakers at sea, and crashing waterfalls, and vast stretches of ocean, and the dance of the stars, but they leave themselves behind out of sight.
Augustine Of Hippo
#38. Everything about him was turning out to be so much more accessible than she had thought. Spark by spark, the fire of the lofty star was going out, revealing a warm and completely lovable earthling under its glare.
Molly Ringle
#39. I think we need to lift our spirits and have high, lofty expectations for this great country of ours.The new normal of two percent [growth] that the left is saying you can't do anything about is so dangerous for our country.
Jeb Bush
#40. When you are a child of the mountains yourself, you really belong to them. You need them. They become the faithful guardians of your life. If you cannot dwell on their lofty heights all your life, if you are in trouble, you want at least to look at them.
Maria Franziska Von Trapp
#41. Soup simmering, music of idle gossip, yammering kids, domestic chaos - long adjusted to this rolling scene, you show them your lofty calm.
Gottfried Keller
#42. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed.
Herman Melville
#43. Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Other call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.
Lao-Tzu
#44. An Indigo Bunting let out a trill, a cheery song, reminding me of better days, of hope and happiness and all the lofty promises a blue canary can sing about. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of the heady morning air. Looking within myself, I searched for the man I once was.
Cheryl R Cowtan
#45. Every athletic career, no matter how modest or lofty, is a journey.
Dan Millman
#46. Nast is an artist of uncommon abilities. His works evince originality of conception, freedom of manner, lofty appreciation of national ideas and action, and a large artistic instinct.
James Jackson Jarves
#47. Lofty words cannot construct an alliance or maintain it; only concrete deeds can do that.
John F. Kennedy
#48. Our words must be judged by our deeds; and in striving for a lofty ideal we must use practical methods; and if we cannot attain all at one leap, we must advance towards it step by step, reasonably content so long as we do actually make some progress in the right direction.
Theodore Roosevelt
#49. They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.
Bill Bryson
#50. Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
Thornton Wilder
#51. What if you began to see your art as something other than your idea? What if it was less lofty and more necessary to your daily rhythm? What if your art is part of a bigger picture, part of a daily grace God has in mind for someone else?
Emily P. Freeman
#52. I could not but smile to hear her talking in this lofty strain, but I was never much displeased with those harmless delusions that tend to make us more happy.
Oliver Goldsmith
#53. Life is a great and noble calling, not a mean and grovelling thing to be shuffled through as best as we can but a lofty and exalted destiny.
Aga Khan III
#54. Comedic actors can be looked at as a lower form because we have to put ourselves in a lower place than most of the audience. I think lofty emotions are somehow considered more special. The best stories in the world to me are the ones that elicit a real emotion, but have humour.
Jim Carrey
#55. Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve regardless of how many times you may have failed in the past or how lofty your aims and hopes may be.
Napoleon Hill
#56. [Faith] was something other than an intellectual exercise. There were no words, no lofty concepts, that could take away the pain. Faith was living with the pain.
Margaret Coel
#57. At the best the body is only the organ and instrument of the soul, and that it must be kept under and made subservient to those lofty purposes which the soul conceives in its secret place and executes in life's arena.
F.B. Meyer
#58. [ ... ] they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter and conscientious.
Marcel Proust
#59. What is lofty can be said in any language. What is mean should be said in none.
Maimonides
#60. Philanthropy is loving, and ameliorative, revolutionary; it wakens lofty desires, new possibilities, achievements, and energies; ... it touches thought to spiritual issues, systematizes action, and insures success.
Mary Baker Eddy
#61. People try to get out of themselves and to escape from the man. This is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they turn into beast; instead of lifting, they degrade themselves. These transcendental humors frighten me, like lofty and inaccessible heights.
Michel De Montaigne
#62. All through history, a nation or a civilization's enduring glory is articulated by its mega constructions - the pyramids, the lofty cathedrals of the Christian world.
F. Sionil Jose
#63. We achieved our mission to the moon. Let's look home from that lofty perch and reimagine our mission on Earth - that is what we need to do here. Together, we can upcycle everything. The world will be better for our positive visions and actions.
William McDonough
#64. Russians have different far lofty ambitions; more of a spiritual kind. It's more about your relationship with God .
Vladimir Putin
#65. Angles from their former lofty positions in the sky. Their absence made everything look different, like a fresh haircut exposing a band of untanned skin on a forehead. Even from deep inside the kitchen, Luke could tell the trees were missing because everything was brighter, more open. Scarier.
Margaret Peterson Haddix
#66. Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#67. If a strong man has not in him the lift toward lofty things, his strength makes him only a curse to himself and his neighbor.
Theodore Roosevelt
#68. How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!
William Shakespeare
#69. The lofty pine is oftenest shaken by the winds;
High towers fall with a heavier crash;
And the lightning strikes the highest mountain.
Horace
#70. Maybe the answer to all of his problems was nothing more than a darkened sky and a glittering city, a lofty perch above the world below. It seemed entirely possible that it was all just a matter of setting and location, and Peter wondered why he hadn't thought of it before.
Jennifer E. Smith
#71. I can't bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#72. Morality was not relative, they claimed, nor even existing solely in the realm of the human condition. No, they proclaimed morality as an imperative of all life, a natural law that was neither the brutal acts of beasts nor the lofty ambitions of humanity, but something other, something unassailable.
Steven Erikson
#73. I'm profoundly changed. There's a bittersweet emotion that I feel from playing this role ... I want the world to be different because I was here. However lofty or crazy or delusional that may sound, I want people's lives to be better because I was here.
Will Smith
#74. I wished God were like He used to be, a few notches lower. I wanted Him to be lofty enough to help me but not so uncontrollable. I longed for His warm presence, times when He seemed more ... safe.
Joni Eareckson Tada
#75. Ethics is not for wimps. It's not easy being a good person. That's why it's such a lofty goal and an admirable achievement
Michael Josephson
#76. From Santi's earthly tomb with demon's hole,
'Cross Rome the mystic elements unfold.
The path of light is laid, the sacred test,
Let angels guide you on your lofty quest.
Dan Brown
#77. The Wanderer then leaves behind the spiritual seeker, with all the accumulated knowledge and lofty spiritual experience, and takes the first step on the Journey.
Frank M. Wanderer
#78. It's my opinion that only in times of utter depression or lofty peace is it appropriate to be creative.
Nicholas Trandahl
#79. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads;
Herman Melville
#80. I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same.
Alice Munro
#81. I have spent a fortune traveling to distant shores and looked at lofty mountains and boundless oceans, and yet I haven't found time to take a few steps from my house to look at a single dew drop on a single blade of grass.
Rabindranath Tagore
#82. On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins; while many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.
H.P. Lovecraft
#83. New Testament gospels are traditionally accorded a cultural sanctity and lofty regard completely out of line with their literary worth.
Thomas Daniel Nehrer
#84. He is a fool who looks at the fruit of lofty trees, but does not measure their height.
Quintus Curtius Rufus
#85. She was incomparable in her inspired loveliness. Her arms amazed one, as one can be astonished by a lofty way of thinking. Her shadow on the wallpaper of the hotel room seemed the silhouette of her uncorruption.
Boris Pasternak
#86. Martin was a thoroughly amiable man, a man of wide reading, but when he came to write he mounted upon a pair of stilts, unusually lofty stilts, and staggered along at a most ungracious pace, with an occasional awkward lurch into colloquialism, giving a strikingly false impression of himself.
Patrick O'Brian
#87. My mother was the bringer of storms. The dark and the light. Death and rebirth. She was as dangerous as she was beautiful as she rode the lightning. Once a potent force of nature she had the nerve to look down on us from those lofty heights.
Scarlett Amaris
#88. Her parents' professional lives served as shining examples of what could be gained from setting lofty and individually unique goals and pursuing them with passion and hard work.
Lisa Genova
#89. When you aimlessly shoot for lofty goals, with no personal connection to them, you loose sight of what really matters, and what will really make you content.
Jinkx Monsoon
#90. Upon entering my vein, the drug would start a warm edge that would surge along until the brain consumed it in a gentle explosion.It began in the back of the neck and rose rapidly until I felt such pleasure that the world sympathizing took on a soft, lofty appeal.
Gus Van Sant
#91. Between 1914 and 1919 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually re-dedicating themselves - as I did that morning in Boulogne - to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal.
Vera Brittain
#92. Example teaches better than precept. It is the best modeler of the character of men and women. To set a lofty example is the richest bequest a man can leave behind him.
Samuel Smiles
#93. I devote myself to what I love the most, and for this very reason I hesitate to designate it with lofty words: I do not want to risk believing that it is a sublime compulsion, a law, which I obey: I love what I love the most too much to wish to appear to it as one compelled.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#94. 12:16 Esteem everyone with the same respect; no one is more important than the other. Associate yourself rather with the lowly than with the lofty. Do not distance yourself from others in your own mind. ("Take a real interest in ordinary people." - JB Phillips)
Francois Du Toit
#95. When greatness descends from its lofty pedestal, it assumes human dimensions.
Louise Colet
#96. To bliss unknown by lofty soul aspires, My lot unequal to my vast desires.
John Arbuthnot
#97. As a kid, I think I wanted to be the on-set dresser for 'Charlie's Angels'. My goals weren't lofty. No. I just wanted to someday quit my paper round and that was about it.
Ryan Reynolds
#98. See here, how fresh is the air, there is the Ganga, and the Sadhus (holy men) are practising meditation, and holding lofty talks! While the moment you will go to Calcutta, you will be thinking of nasty stuff.
Swami Vivekananda
#99. Am I willing to give up my lofty ideas of success - even the "success" of serving God in great and visible ways - and instead content myself to serve in the mundane, to be largely invisible, and to meet the needs of those who can't return the favor?
Anonymous
#100. Do not little strokes - fell lofty oaks? Will not continual droppings - wear away stones? Sin, a little thing?
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
