Top 51 On The Sublime Quotes
#1. 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. All phenomena are empty. They contain nothing worth desiring.
Bodhidharma
#2. Perfect moments, especially when they verge on the sublime have the grave disadvantage of being very short lived, which in fact, being obvious, we would not need to mention were it not that they have a still greater disadvantage, which is that we do not know what to do once they are over.
Jose Saramago
#4. But when on shore, & wandering in the sublime forests, surrounded by views more gorgeous than even Claude ever imagined, I enjoy a delight which none but those who have experienced it can understand - If it is to be done, it must be by studying Humboldt.
Charles Darwin
#5. I kiss the soil as if I placed a kiss on the hands of a mother, for the homeland is our earthly mother. I consider it my duty to be with my compatriots in this sublime and difficult moment.
Pope John Paul II
#6. He loved the soothing hour, when the last tints of light die away; when the stars, one by one, tremble through aether, and are reflected on the dark mirror of the waters; that hour, which, of all others, inspires the mind with pensive tenderness, and often elevates it to sublime contemplation.
Ann Radcliffe
#7. If it was occasionally ludicrous, it was always sublime. [Estelle Jussim on the 19th century Cult of the Beautiful.]
Estelle Jussim
#8. The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason.
Jacques-Louis David
#9. I love idyllic places and the kind of suspension of history they offer. But noble beauty is not enough. One must complicate the picture, because there's nowhere to "escape" to on the planet in pursuit of a hermetic pastoralism or a redemptive wilderness sublime.
Michael Light
#10. When I got my first guitar, I played along with everything I heard that had guitar in it, like the Ramones, Nirvana and Sublime, as well as whatever hip-hop and R&B stuff was on the radio.
Gary Clark Jr.
#11. Men are not on such intimate terms with the sublime that they really can believe in it
Soren Kierkegaard
#12. If you will observe, it doesn't take A man of giant mould to make A giant shadow on the wall; And he who in our daily sight Seems but a figure mean and small, Outlined in Fame's illusive light, May stalk, a silhouette sublime, Across the canvas of his time.
John Townsend Trowbridge
#13. When authors and critics talk of the sublime, they see not how nearly it borders on the ridiculous.
Thomas Paine
#14. There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb The crowns o' the world; oh, eyes sublime With tears and laughter for all time!
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#15. Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
Dick Winters
#16. It was a scent that lacked coyness, made no concessions to charm. Like standing on the edge of a great and terrifying cliff, it was shocking, beautiful, sublime.
Kathleen Tessaro
#17. [When nature appears complicated:] The moment we contemplate it as it is, and attain a position from which we can take a commanding view, though but of a small part of its plan, we never fail to recognize that sublime simplicity on which the mind rests satisfied that it has attained the truth.
John Herschel
#18. All that hurry can blur the truth that life is a zero-sum equation. Every minute I save will get used on something else, possibly no more sublime than staring at the newel post trying to remember what I just ran upstairs for.
Barbara Kingsolver
#19. We hence acquire this sublime and interesting idea; that all the calcareous mountains in the world, and all the strata of clay, coal, marl, sand, and iron, which are incumbent on them, are MONUMENTS OF THE PAST FELICITY OF ORGANIZED NATURE!
Erasmus Darwin
#20. During the age Atlantis, there were only several hundred thousand people living on our planet. They lived in a sublime state of harmony with nature. At that time, because of the purity of the earth's aura, it was much easier to meditate.
Frederick Lenz
#21. And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks
Tom Robbins
#22. Without minute neatness of execution, the sublime cannot exist! Grandeur of ideas is founded on precision of ideas.
William Blake
#23. Kant, as we all know, compared moral law to the starry heavens, and found them both sublime. On the naturalistic hypothesis we should rather compare it to the protective blotches on a beetle's back, and find them both ingenious.
Arthur Balfour
#24. A reader can only embrace the open-armed Dear Everybody ... In Benders unsent letters of apology or thanks, Michael Kimball transforms the familiar into the strange again and the simplest confessions are made moments of sublime wonder. Hold on to this book.
Christine Schutt
#25. Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heel of small
war
until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime
Robert Lowell
#26. If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answering that immoderate desire for the infinite and the vague that we call the soul, it is art.
Gustave Flaubert
#27. If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.
Denis Diderot
#28. Freemasonry is a moral order, instituted by virtuous men, with the praiseworthy design of recalling to our remembrance the most sublime truths, in the midst of the most innocent and social pleasures, founded on liberality, brotherly love and charity.
Andrew Jackson
#29. The deepest and most sublime hatred is a hatred which creates ideals and transforms values - something whose like has never been seen on earth
Fredrich Nietzsche
#30. Fish play in the water
birds play in the sky
ordinary beings play on the earth
sublime beings play in display.
Thinley Norbu
#31. Yet the love we experience through other people is just a shadow of the love of the inner self. There is a sublime place inside us where love dwells. The love that pulses in the cave of the heart does not depend on anything outside. It does not expect anything. It is completely independent.
Swami Muktananda
#32. Silence is sometimes more significant and sublime than the most noble and most expressive eloquence, and is on many occasions the indication of a great mind.
Joseph Addison
#33. I need someone whose mind falls like a chopper on a block; to whom the pitch of absurdity is sublime, and a shoestring adorable. To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?
Virginia Woolf
#34. But when on shore, & wandering in the sublime forests, surrounded by views more gorgeous than even Claude ever imagined, I enjoy a delight which none but those who have experienced it can understand.
Charles Darwin
#35. They left no books , Memorial to their lonely thought In grey parishes: rather they wrote On men's hearts and in the minds Of young children sublime words Too soon forgotten. God in his time Or out of time will correct this.
R.S. Thomas
#36. I've been compiling a list of art project ideas for a long time. These are ideas of things I would love to see someday. They range from the practical - jackets with woodstoves in them - to the sublime - images of nuns on waterslides.
Misha Collins
#37. Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.
Alain De Botton
#38. She thinks of him lying there, the beautiful moment never arriving, never ruined, never disappointing, over. It must be sublime dwelling in that house of longing, forever poised on desire's trembling tip, before everything is wrecked.
Susan Johnson
#39. Hers was the perfect love that dwells on the other's happiness, and not on its own. She knew that, though for the time being he would find bliss and oblivion in her arms, he would soon repine in inactivity whilst others fought for that which he held sublime.
Emmuska Orczy
#40. When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.
Jane Austen
#41. Walking, it turns out, is a sublime way to get to know people in China. They're used to meeting strangers on the road. Many here understand what it feels like to walk a long way.
Evan Osnos
#42. I don't think, there's no possible way for me, anyway, to play a character that I haven't found some sort of sublime compassion for and I related to Deborah on a way that almost, initially, almost in a way maybe someone in the audience might.
Tea Leoni
#43. Sublime Philosophy! Thou art the patriarch's ladder, reaching heaven; And bright with beckoning angels-but alas! We see thee, like the patriarch, but in dreams, By the first step, dull slumbering on the earth.
Alan Judd
#44. Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#45. Like most young people, these two attributed to the world their own intelligence and virtues. Youth who knows no failure has no mercy on the faults of other people; but it has also a sublime faith in them.
Honore De Balzac
#46. In the life of husband and wife together, fatherhood and motherhood represent such a sublime "novelty" and richness as can only be approached "on one's knees".
Pope John Paul II
#47. In blissful solitude; he then survey'd Hell and the Gulf between, and Satan there Coasting the wall of Heav'n on this side Night In the dun Air sublime,
John Milton
#48. How sublime to look down on the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet!
Thomas Jefferson
#49. The beautiful must ever rest in the arms of the sublime. The gentle needs the strong to sustain it, as much as the rock-flowers need rocks to grow on, or the ivy the rugged wall which it embraces.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#50. Onward and sublime
Will ever glide
The silent stream of Time,
That bears us on its tide.
Harvey Rice
#51. He would never forget the feeling of that first year, the sense of freedom just being on his own gave him. He had his own room for the first time, his own money to spend as he wanted, his own food to buy and places to go and decisions to make; it was glorious, sublime.
Iain Banks
