Empyrean Quotes & Sayings

Star-watching: at night the stars of Alastor Cluster blaze in profusion. The atmosphere refracts their light; the sky quivers with beams, glitters, and errant flashes. The Trills go out into their gardens with jugs of wine; they name the stars and discusses localities. For the Trills, for almost anyone of Alastor, the night sky was no abstract empyrean, but rather a view across prodigious distances to known places: a vast luminous map. — Jack Vance

The friendship of fine-hearted, generous boys, nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts and elegancies of life, sometimes transcends the bounds of mere boyishness, and revels for a while in the empyrean of a love which only comes short, by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes. — Herman Melville

Only by being suspended aloft, by dangling my mind in the heavens and mingling my rare thought with the ethereal air, could I ever achieve strict scientific accuracy in my survey of the vast empyrean. Had I pursued my inquiries from down there on the ground, my data would be worthless. The earth, you see, pulls down the delicate essence of thought to its own gross level. — Aristophanes

Metal is from the earth, he thought as he scrutinized. From below: from that realm which is the lowest, the most dense. Land of trolls and caves, dank, always dark. Yin world, in its most melancholy aspect. World of corpses, decay and collapse. Of feces. All that has died, slipping and disintegrating back down layer by layer. The daemonic world of the immutable; the time-that-was.
And yet, in the sunlight, the silver triangle glittered. It reflected light. Fire, Mr. Tagomi thought. Not dank or dark object at all. Not heavy, weary, but pulsing with life. The high realm, aspect of yang: empyrean, ethereal. As befits work of art. Yes, that is artist's job: takes mineral rock from dark silent earth transforms it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.
Has brought the dead to life. Corpse turned to fiery display; the past had yielded to the future. — Philip K. Dick

Overcome the Empyrean; hurl
Heaven and Earth out of their places,
That in the same calamity
Brother and brother, friend and friend,
Family and family,
City and city may contend. — William Butler Yeats

So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean? Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing. - RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The American Scholar — Haven Kimmel

Love, the one supreme, unceasing source of human felicity, the one sole joy which lifts the whole mortal existence into the empyrean, was by it [Christianity] degraded into the mere mechanical action of reproduction. — Ouida

Mr. Blue's way of death was fitting. He had been utterly corrupted by America, and I find it proper that his carotid artery should have been severed by flak from a jumbo-sized can of mentholated shave cream. Like James Joyce, who tried to bend and subjugate the ironmongery of the cosmos with words (wasn't it The Word Joyce was after?), Mr. Blue tried to undo the empyrean mysteries with Seedy and his red carpet, with his elevated alligator shoes, with the ardent push-ups he seemed so sure would make him outlast time's ravages, with his touching search for some golden pussy that would yield to his lips the elixir of eternal life. And like Joyce's Leopold Bloom, like Quixote, Mr. Blue had become the perennial mock-epic hero of his country, the salesman, the boomer who believed that at the end of his American sojourn of demeaning doorbell-ringing, of faking and fawning, he would come to the Ultimate Sale, conquer, and soar. — Frederick Exley

The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs. — Rose Macaulay

He had read of 'Space': at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now - now that the very name 'Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean all the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he now saw that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes-and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they made it simply the heavens. The heavens which declared the glory."
C. S. Lewis — C.S. Lewis

As an actor, you may do things that aren't politically correct. Unless you're an actor who only does things for political reasons. I believe if we don't do the good, bad, and the ugly, we're not going to progress. — Rosie Perez

Absolute silence greeted the mystery of death, and for a time impossible to measure they waited, motionless, while Lynn's spirit rose from her body. Severo felt a long howl surging from the center of the earth and passing through his body to his lips, but it did not escape. The scream invaded him, filled him, and burst inside his head in a silent explosion.
Portrait in Sepia, Isabel Allende. — Isabel Allende

Only those elements time cannot wear: The Angels, the Empyrean, and the First Matter are the elements time cannot wear, for they will last to all time. Man, however, in his mortal state, is not eternal. The Gate of Hell, therefore, was created before man. The theological point is worth attention. The doctrine of Original Sin is, of course, one familiar to many creeds. Here, however, it would seem that the preparation for damnation predates Original Sin. True, in one interpretation. Hell was created for the punishment of the Rebellious Angels and not for man. Had man not sinned, he would never have known Hell. But on the other hand, Dante's God was one who knew all, and knew therefore that man would indeed sin. The theological problem is an extremely delicate one. — Dante Alighieri

For there was need once more of a Divine Revelation to the torpid frivolous children of men, if they were not to sink altogether into the ape condition. And in that whirlwind of the Universe, - lights obliterated, and the torn wrecks of Earth and Hell hurled aloft into the Empyrean; black whirlwind, which made even apes serious, and drove most of them mad, - there was, to men, a voice audible; voice from the heart of things once more, as if to say: "Lying is not permitted in this Universe. The wages of lying, you behold, are death. Lying means damnation in this Universe; and Beelzebub, never so elaborately decked in crowns and mitres, is NOT God!" This was a revelation truly to be named of the Eternal, in our poor Eighteenth Century; and has greatly altered the complexion of said Century to the Historian ever since. — Thomas Carlyle

Like all religious thinkers, he carries with his scholar's equipment a pair of metaphysical wings, wherewith at any moment he may soar into the empyrean, out of reach of vulgar materialists, like you and me. — Upton Sinclair

He had violent passions, and on occasion desire seized his body so that he was driven to an orgy of lust, but he hated the instincts that robbed him of his self-possession. I think, even, he hated the inevitable partner in his debauchery. When he had regained command over himself, he shuddered at the sight of the woman he had enjoyed. His thoughts floated then serenely in the empyrean, and he felt towards her the horror that perhaps the painted butterfly, hovering about the flowers, feels to the filthy chrysalis from which it has triumphantly emerged. I suppose that art is a manifestation of the sexual instinct. It is the same emotion which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a lovely woman, the Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and the Entombment of Titian. It is possible that Strickland hated the normal release of sex because it seemed to him brutal by comparison with the satisfaction of artistic creation. — W. Somerset Maugham

On Wednesday, July 19, the Council, having gleaned and discerned, released its official verdict: the fall of the tile bearing the letter "Z" constitutes the terrestrial manifestation of an empyrean Nollopian desire, that desire most surely being that the letter "Z" should be utterly excised
fully extirpated
absolutively heave-ho'ed from our communal vocabulary! — Mark Dunn

However dark our lot may be, there is light enough on the other side of the cloud, in that pure empyrean where God dwells, to irradiate every darkness of this world; light enough to clear every difficult question, remove every ground of obscurity, conquer every atheistic suspicion, silence every hard judgment, light enough to satisfy, nay, to ravish the mind forever. — Horace Bushnell

My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane ... "
That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual vortex.
He went down slowly. "My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane ... — Aldous Huxley

When in doubt chicken out. — Robin Jones Gunn

According to your proclivities, you may take a snow-clad Alpine peak, as it rises to the empyrean in radiant majesty, as symbol of man's aspiration to union with the Infinite; or since, if you like to believe that, a mountain range may be thrown up by some violent convulsion in the earth's depths, you may take it as a symbol of the dark and sinister passions of man that lour to destroy him; or, if you want to be in the fashion, you may take it as a phallic symbol. — W. Somerset Maugham

Now that the very name "space" seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring in at every moment. — C.S. Lewis

The flight of most members of a profession to the high empyrean, where they can work peacefully on purely scientific problems, isolated from the turmoil of real life, was perhaps quite appropriate at an earlier stage of science; but in today's world it is a luxury we cannot afford. — Gerald Holton

Call it what you like: The Upper Sky, the Unmade, even the Empyrean. Men have given it so many names over the course of history. But those names don't really matter, in the end. It's the unchanging matter. A place without qualities. Neither hot nor cold, wet nor dry. The aether remains while all else shifts and fades ... The aether is the opposite of creation. It's always there, invisible but burning bright. It's the pale web that holds the universe together. — Adam McOmber

Whenever I'm around him, all I can think about is how much more I want to be around him. — Colleen Hoover

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. — E. M. Forster

When I was a child, I lived in Morocco, and I would always buy a lot of beads from the markets and to make jewellery for friends. Later, at 18, I would do my own clothes and make my own patterns. When I first came to New York, people just assumed I was a stylist because I was so into fashion. — Maripol