Infinitude Quotes & Sayings

Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter's rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze. At last, after September, another weather arrives, an Indian summer that occasionally endures until Christmas. — Truman Capote

We come no nearer the infinitude of the creative power of God, if we enclose the space of its revelation within a sphere described with the radius of the Milky Way, than if we were to limit it to a ball an inch in diameter. All that is finite, whatever has limits and a definite relation to unity, is equally far removed from the infinite ... Eternity is not sufficient to embrace the manifestations of the Supreme Being, if it is not combined with the infinitude of space. — Immanuel Kant

Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. — Thomas Carlyle

There is Shadow and there is Substance, and this is the root of all things. Of Substance, there is only Amber, the real city, upon the real Earth, which contains everything. Of Shadow, there is an infinitude of things. Every possibility exists somewhere as a Shadow of the real. — Roger Zelazny

My feeling is that an observer needs to see four hundred and fifty stars to get that feeling of infinitude, and be swept away ... and I didn't make that number up arbitrarily, that's the number of stars that are available once you get dimmer than third magnitude. So in the city, you see a dozen stars, a handful, and it's attractive to no one. And if there's a hundred stars in the sky it still doesn't do it. There's a certain tipping point where people will look and there will be that planetarium view. And now you're touching that ancient core, whether it's collective memories or genetic memories, or something else form way back before we were even human ... astronomer Bob Berman quoted in The End of Night — Paul Bogard

The cure to combat the three Ss- stress, strain, and speed- can be found in three Ws- the work of devoted practice, the wisdom that comes of understanding the self and the world, and worship because ultimately surrendering to what we cannot control allows the ego to relax and lose the anxiety of its own infinitesimally small self in the infinitude of the divine. — B.K.S. Iyengar

I ... had what Kierkegaard called 'the sickness of infinitude,' wandering from one path to another with no real recognition that I was embarked upon a search, and scarcely a clue as to what I might be after. I only knew that at the bottom of each breath there was a hollow place that needed to be filled. — Peter Matthiessen

A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind. — Clive Bell

With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars. All of us live in the unfathomable mystery and infinitude of the universe. Pursuing 'philosophy of the universe' through art under such circumstances has led me to what I call 'stereotypical repetition.' — Yayoi Kusama

That's my window. This minute
So gently did I alight
From sleep--was still floating in it.
Where has my life its limit
And where begins the night?

I could fancy all things around me
Were nothing but I as yet;
Like a crystal's depth, profoundly
Mute, translucent, unlit.

I have space to spare inside me
For the stars, too: so full of room
Feels my heart; so lightly
Would it let go of him, whom

For all I know I have started
To love, it may be to hold.
Strange, as if never charted,
Stares my fortune untold.

Why is it I am bedded
Beneath this infinitude,
Fragrant like a meadow,
Hither and thither moved,

Calling out, yet fearing
Someone might hear the cry,
Destined to disappearing
Within another I. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The many faces of Collective Vision united by the mandalic eye-field suggest both expansion of consciousness and sharing of consciousness with other beings. The painting was based on a profoundly ego dissolving entheogenic mystical trance where I heard the words, 'Infinite Oneness ... the Oneness should never forget the Infinitude and the Infinitude should never forget the Oneness ... ' — Alex Grey

Nevertheless, in a passage that is very often commented upon because it summarizes the entire salvific economy of faith, the Apostle calls Christ the 'pioneer and perfecter of our faith' (Heb. 12:2), because he has to accomplish the same act as the Christian, only in the opposite direction, as it were. Whereas by venturing to let go of everything the Christian takes a stand beyond finitude and comes into the limitlessness of God, Christ, in order to make this act possible and to be its source, has dared to emerge from the infinitude of the 'form of God' and 'did not think equality with God a thing to be grasped,' has dared to set out into the limitation and emptiness of time. This involved a transcendence and a boundary crossing no less fundamental than that of the Christian, and Christ undertook it so as to entrust himself henceforth within time, with no guarantee or mitigation from eternity, to the Father's will, which is always given to him in the present moment. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

The idea of the Universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman, is no longer plausible. It isn't that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of the Universe. — Alan Watts

Man's awesome scientific advances into the infinitude of space as well as the infinitude of sub-atomic particles seems most likely to lead to the total destruction of our world unless we can make great advances in understanding and dealing with interpersonal and inter-group tensions. I — Carl R. Rogers

The mind must be made calm and still. Then it is aimed at the sky, at the brightness, at that infinitude of being that stretches out endlessly in every direction forever. — Frederick Lenz

All finite things reveal infinitude: The mountain with its singular bright shade Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow, The after-light upon ice-burdened pines; Odor of basswood upon a mountain slope, A scene beloved of bees; Silence of water above a sunken tree: The pure serene of memory of one man,- A ripple widening from a single stone Winding around the waters of the world. — Theodore Roethke

Every poet ... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal. — Thomas Carlyle

An infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all truly great men. — John Ruskin

The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, reallyshow very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have only one doctrine, the infinitude of the private man. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

God is Infinite Wisdom, and Power, and Goodness - and LOVE; but if this idea is too vast for your human faculties - if your mind loses itself in its overwhelming infinitude, fix it on Him who condescended to take our nature upon Him, who was raised to Heaven even in His glorified human body, in whom the fulness of the Godhead shines. — Anne Bronte

The infinitude of creation is great enough to make a world, or a Milky Way of worlds, look in comparison with it what a flower or an insect does in comparison with the Earth. — Immanuel Kant

Once the person begins to look to his relationship to the Ultimate Power, to infinitude, and to refashion his links from those around him to that Ultimate Power, he opens up to himself the horizon of unlimited possibility, of real freedom. — Ernest Becker

Laws, written, if not on stone tables, yet on the azure of infinitude, in the inner heart of God's creation, certain as life, certain as death, are there, and thou shalt not disobey them. — Thomas Carlyle

Well might the ancients make silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness,
at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends. — Thomas Carlyle

[I]f thou thinkest the infinite thou perceivest and affirmest the infinitude of the power of thought[.] — Ludwig Feuerbach

In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am Mrs. Poulteney. I have come to take up residence. Kindly inform your Master."
"His Infinitude has been informed of your decease, ma'am. His angels have already sung a Jubilate in celebration of the event."
"That is most proper and kind of Him." And the worthy lady, pluming and swelling, made to sweep into the imposing white hall she saw beyond the butler's head. But the man did not move aside. Instead, he rather impertinently jangled some keys he chanced to have in his hand.
"My man! Make way. I am she. Mrs. Poulteney of Lyme Regis."
"Formerly of Lyme Regis, ma'am. And now of a much more tropical abode."
With that, the brutal flunkey slammed the door in her face. — John Fowles

The self must be destroyed, brought down to nothing, in order for self-transcendence to begin. Then the self can begin to relate itself to powers beyond itself. It has to thrash around in its finitude, it has to "die," in order to question that finitude, in order to see beyond it. To what? Kierkegaard answers: to infinitude, to absolute transcendence, the the Ultimate Power of Creation which made finite creatures. — Ernest Becker

Etchings endure,
But not in Sand
Meanings Collide
To Unresolved Fragments
Codes fizzle to Static
They are not lost
But Unheard
Never lost
Fading slowly to Silence
By infinite degrees — Ashim Shanker

Nothing upsets the philosophical mind more than when he hears that from now on all philosophy is supposed to lie caught in the shackles of one system. Never has he felt greater than when he sees before him the infinitude of knowledge. The entire dignity of his science consists in the fact that it will never be completed. In that moment in which he would believe to have completed his system, he would become unbearable to himself. He would, in that moment, cease to be a creator, and would instead descend to being an instrument of his creation. — Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar Stood ruled, stood vast infinitude confined; Till at his second bidding darkness fled, Light shone, and order from disorder sprung. — John Milton

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials
I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered
it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments. — Susan Vreeland

Tantric Zen is the awareness of the infinitude of all things. To gain that awareness, to be it, is enlightenment. — Frederick Lenz

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome. — George Santayana

How completely satisfying to turn from our limitations to a God who has none. Eternal years lie in His heart. For Him time does not pass, it remains; and those who are in Christ share with Him all the riches of limitless time and endless years. God never hurries. There are no deadlines against which He must work. Only to know this is to quiet our spirits and relax our nerves. For those out of Christ, time is a devouring beast; before the sons of the new creation time crouches and purrs and licks their hands. The foe of the old human race becomes the friend of the new, and the stars in their courses fight for the man God delights to honor. This we may learn from the divine infinitude. — A.W. Tozer

In God there is an infinitude of things which I cannot comprehend, nor possibly even reach in any way by thought; for it is the nature of the infinite that my nature, which is finite and limited, should not comprehend it. — Rene Descartes

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude. — Alfred North Whitehead

It is the "where I am" that makes heaven. The life after death might become through its very endlessness a burden to our spirits, if it were not to be filled with the infinite variety and freshness of God's love. Some have shrunk from its very infinitude, because they have not realized what God's love can make of it. Human love helps us to understand this. When we have come to love any one with all our power of affection, then there is no monotony or weariness in the days and hours we spend with them. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself. — Thomas Carlyle

Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

what we call existence is a womb of infinitude, and is itself only incubatory - that eventually all attempts are broken down by the falsely excluded. — Charles Fort

I think there will always be a possibility that God doesn't exist because He is infinitude and into that infinitude must come that possibility. — John Tavener

We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence. — Charlotte Bronte

The infinitude of Jiu Jitsu allows for the infinitude of the types of practitioners. There exists a game for each and every one of us which is specifically possible within the confines of our particular skill set. — Chris Matakas

Whether we be young or old,Our destiny, our being's heart and home,Is with infinitude, and only there;With hope it is, hope that can never die,Effort and expectation, and desire,And something evermore about to be. — William Wordsworth

Euclid ... manages to obtain a rigorous proof without ever dealing with infinity, by reducing the problem [of the infinitude of primes] to the study of finite numbers. This is exactly what contemporary mathematical analysis does. — Lucio Russo

As the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The mercy of God is infinite too, and the man who has felt the grinding pain of inward guilt knows that this is more than academic. "Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound." Abounding sin is the terror of the world, but abounding grace is the hope of mankind. however sin may abound it still has its limits, for it is the product of finite minds and hearts; but God's much more" introduces us to infinitude. Against our deep creature-sickness stands God's infinite ability to cure. The Christian witness through the centuries has been that "God so loved the world ... "; it remains for us to see that love in the light of God's infinitude. His love is measureless. It is more: it is boundless. It has no bounds because it is not a thing but a facet of the essential nature of God. His love is something He is, and because He is infinite that love can enfold the whole created world in itself and have room for ten thousand times ten thousand worlds beside. — A.W. Tozer

I've never been able to understand 'faith' myself, nor to see how a just God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion out of an infinitude of false ones - by faith alone. It strikes me as a sloppy way to run an organization, whether universe or a smaller one. — Robert A. Heinlein

God sometimes sends flowers -but I like it best when he darkens the sky and lights up an infinitude of worlds ... — John Geddes

Even though man himself is mortal, he can imagine neither the end of space nor of time nor of history nor of a people, for he always lives in an illusory infinitude.
Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end nearer and that joyous watchwords like 'forward' and 'farther' are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it. — Milan Kundera

The living model never answers well the idea or impressions the painter wishes to express; one must, therefore, learn to do without one, and for that, you must acquire facility, furnish one's memory to the point of infinitude, and make numerous drawings after the old masters. — Eugene Delacroix

Man's needs are infinite, and infinitude can be achieved only in the spiritual realm, never in the material. — E.F. Schumacher

Love burns across the infinitude. — Nicholas Sparks

The third major characteristic of God - "infinitude" - is the catchall, the universal modifier of Christian theology. God is not merely a being; he is infinite being. God is not merely good; he is infinite goodness. God is not merely wise; he is infinite wisdom. And so on down the list. God is exaggeration run amuck. — George H. Smith

On Improbability:
There's an infinite number of things that can go wrong but only a finite number of things that can go right.
In the infinitude of unlikely events many will happen with unnerving frequency.
Tautology: A given improbable event isn't likely to happen.
Corollary: Shit happens, but you'll not know its ilk.
I'm certain that nothing is certain. — Kalifer Deil

He wanted his articles to be, not infinite exactly, but big enough to suggest infinitude. — Garth Risk Hallberg