Profoundest Quotes & Sayings

There is no reason why the profoundest thoughts should not make easy and exciting reading. A profound thought is an exciting thing as exciting as a detective's deductions or hunches. The simpler the words in which a thought is expressed the more stimulating its effect. — Eric Hoffer

The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image. — Charles W. Chesnutt

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone. — Octavio Paz

If you want to obtain the secrets of such wonderful techniques, drill yourself, harden yourself, undergo severe training, abandoned body and mind; follow this course for years and you will naturally reach the profoundest levels. To know if water is hot or cold you must taste it yourself. — Yamaoka Tesshu

Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler, purer, Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and profoundest spiritual possibilities. — Sri Aurobindo

The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission is to preach and to teach. These are gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don't ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your petty life is of no concern to them. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that? — Henry Miller

Accordingly, France Had Voltaire, and his school of negative thinkers, and England (or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker on record, David Hume: a man, the peculiarities of whose mind qualified him to detect failure of proof, and want of logical consistency, at a depth which French skeptics, with their comparatively feeble powers of analysis and abstractions stop far short of, and which German subtlety alone could thoroughly appreciate, or hope to rival. — John Stuart Mill

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest lawsof atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. — Willard Van Orman Quine

It is an observation of one of the profoundest inquirers into human affairs that a revolution of government is the strongest proof that can be given by a people of their virtue and good sense. — John Adams

The great artists do not seek their forms in the midst of the past, but take the deepest soundings they can of the genuine, profoundest of their age. — Franz Marc

But Chinese civilization has the overpowering beauty of the wholly other, and only the wholly other can inspire the deepest love and the profoundest desire to learn. — Joseph Needham

Be not virtuous beyond your powers! And seek nothing from yourselves opposed to probability!...

Shy, ashamed, awkward, like the tiger whose spring hath failed - thus, ye higher men, have I often seen you slink aside. A cast which ye made had failed...

The higher its type, always the seldomer doth a thing succeed. Ye higher men here, have ye not all - been failures?

Be of good cheer; what doth it matter? How much is still possible! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as ye ought to laugh!

What wonder even that ye have failed and only half-succeeded, ye half-shattered ones! Doth not - man's future strive and struggle in you?
Man's furthest, profoundest, star-highest issues, his prodigious powers - do not all these foam through one another in your vessel?

What wonder that many a vessel shattereth! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as ye ought to laugh! Ye higher men, Oh, how much is still possible! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Hell is the bloodcurdling mansion of time, in whose profoundest circle Satan himself waits, winding a gargantuan watch in his hand. — Antonio Machado

Moments come and go; quick flickers in time. Yet those moments can have the profoundest impact on our lives. Either we seize them, and wield them to our needs, or we let them go. It's the moments we let go that, I believe, remain with us strongest - because regret is something that never leaves us. — B.N. Toler

He feared that beyond the quilted gray satin of the undertaker's keep there was only a world of mystery that bypassed the comprehension of men and did not even take them into consideration. A world of utter darkness and the profoundest of silences. — William Gay

Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provoke it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power. In the present instance the stage is a scrubbed gun deck, and one of the external provocations a man-of-war's-man's spilled soup. — Herman Melville

Plato utterly condemns the poets for publishing trivial, false and indeed wicked stories about the gods, such as that they fight with each other, or are overcome by emotions like grief, anger, mirth. Reluctantly, he will not allow Homer in his Republic, and he is very angry with the tragic poets for spreading unworthy ideas of the Deity.

It may well be that there were inferior tragic poets who deserved Plato's strictures, but so far as concerns the tragic poets whom we know, Plato's attack is absurd. It is the attack of a severely intellectual philosopher who was also more of a poet than most poets have contrived to be; one who invented some of the profoundest and most beautiful of Greek myths. 'There is a long-standing quarrel', says Plato, 'between philosophy and poetry.' So there was, on the part of the philosophers, and most of all in Plato's own soul. — H.D.F. Kitto

I always know a lie when I hear it, and the effect it has on me is no good at all. I go berserk just forcing myself not to go berserk, just trying to see truth in the lie, to see it in full context, and in a dimension in which it has got to be more than just a lie, possibly the profoundest kind of truth. — William, Saroyan

In times of long established peace, when the tradition of generations has established the illusion of the profoundest human security, men's minds are not greatly distressed by grotesqueness and absurdity in their political forms. It is all part of the humour and the good-humour of life. When one believes that all the tigers in the jungle are dead, it is quite amusing to walk along the jungle paths in a dressing-gown with a fan instead of a gun. — H.G.Wells

From the point of view of the Christian faith, man comes in the profoundest sense to himself not through what he does but through what he accepts. He must wait for the gift of love, and love can only be received as a gift ... One must wait for it, let it be given to one. And one cannot become wholly man in any other way than by being loved, by letting oneself be loved ... If he declines to let himself be presented with the gift, then he destroys himself. — Pope Benedict XVI

Is it possible to love a woman who will never understand the profoundest interests of my life?
Is it possible to love a woman simply for her beauty, to love the statue of a woman? — Leo Tolstoy

Solitude is the profoundest fact — Octavio Paz

Love might or might not promote kindness, gratify vanity, and clear the skin, but it did not lead to happiness; there was always an inequality of feeling or intention present. such was love's nature. of course, it 'worked' in the sense that it caused life's profoundest emotions, made him fresh as a spring's linden-blossom and broke him like a traitor on the wheel. — Julian Barnes

The sense of form in New Mexico is for me one of the profoundest, most original, and most beautiful I have personally experienced. It must be 'learned.' . . . It is not a country of light on things. It is a country of things in light. — Marsden Hartley

If you should take the human heart and listen to it, it would be like listening to a sea-shell; you would hear in it the hollow murmur of the infinite ocean to which it belongs, from which it draws its profoundest inspiration, and for which it yearns. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The profoundest of all sensualities
is the sense of truth
and the next deepest sensual experience
is the sense of justice. — D.H. Lawrence

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The simplest action is worth more than the profoundest thought. — Marty Rubin

One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom -such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it -those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain. — Friedrich Nietzsche

You, my Brown Guard, will regard it as a matter of course that this German people should go only by the way which Providence ordained for it when it gave to Germans the common language. So we go forward with the profoundest faith in God into the future. Would that which we have achieved have been possible if Providence had not helped us? — Adolf Hitler

So I wonder what it is this need to tell.
To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling. — Peter Heller

How can we know ourselves by ourselves? ... Soul needs intimate connection, not only to individuate, but simply to live. For this we need relationships of the profoundest kind through which we can realize ourselves, where self-revelation is possible, where interest in and love for soul is paramount. — James Hillman

The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt. — George Santayana

Love is the profoundest of secrets. Divulged, even to the beloved, it is no longer Love. As if it were merely I that loved you. When love ceases, then it is divulged. — Henry David Thoreau

Farewel happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n. — John Milton

Hail O mighty, fathomless sleep, come on and hug me tight and sweet;
when I whisper those deepest pains, onto your ears mute and keen,
sing for me the sweetest song that would sound the profoundest of life!
Leave me upon your rocking arms, watched by spirits of placid nights!

Goodnight, world, sweet dreams folks, blessed are those who would sleep at peace! — Preeth Nambiar

We do not by any means think it desirable that the kingdom of righteousness and peace should be established on earth (because under any circumstances it would be the kingdom of the profoundest mediocrity and Chinaism); we rejoice in all men, who like ourselves love danger, war and adventure, who do not make compromises, nor let themselves be captured, conciliated and stunted; we count ourselves among the conquerors; we ponder over the need of a new order of things, even of a new slavery for every strengthening and elevation of the type "man" also involves a new form of slavery. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth derives its strength not so much from itself as from the brilliant contrast it makes with what is only apparently true. This applies especially to Chess, where it is often found that the profoundest moves do not much startle the imagination. — Emanuel Lasker

Reverence for life, veneratio vitae, is the most direct and at the same time the profoundest achievement of my will-to-live. — Albert Schweitzer

Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh? — Leslie Stephen

What is art? A violet. Is that all? An artistic style is a living entity, a continuous process of invention. It can never be imposed from without; born of the profoundest tendencies within a society, its direction is to a certain extent unpredictable, in much the same way as the eventual configuration of a tree's branches. — Octavio Paz

The profoundest and most excellent dispositions and orders seem very bad, and every learned militarist criticizes them with looks of importance, when they relate to a battle that has been lost, and the very worst dispositions and orders seem very good, and serious people fill whole volumes to demonstrate their merits, when they relate to a battle that has been won. — Leo Tolstoy

Prayer is the highest intelligence, the profoundest wisdom, the most vital, the most joyous, the most efficacious, the most powerful of all vocations. — Edward McKendree Bounds

And, in fact, if these crimes appeal less to the senses, they appeal more to the mind; and the mind, in the last analysis, is the profoundest part of us. For the novelist, therefore, there is a new type of tragedy to be derived from these crimes, more intellectual than physical in character, which do not really seem to be crimes to the superficial judgement of old materialistic societies because they do not involve bloodshed, and murder is committed only in the sphere of feelings and manners. — Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly

It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant. — Clive Barker

To hell, allegiance! Vows, to the blackest devil!
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation — William Shakespeare

The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable. — H.P. Lovecraft

The most agreeable of all companions is a simple, frank man, without any high pretensions to an oppressive greatness; one who loves life, and understands the use of it; obliging alike at all hours; above all, of a golden temper and steadfast as an anchor. For such an one we gladly exchange the greatest genius, the most brilliant wit, the profoundest thinker. — Lessing G.

Platitudes are generally the oldest and profoundest of truths ... — Frances Noyes Hart

So it became,
the law of universe,
to have the,
profoundest,
of the words,
cloaked in the,
darkest of the masks. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

If written in the three-letter words of the four-letter alphabet,a human being is determined by a genetic narrative long enough to fill the equivalent of 500 Bibles.In the meantime human beings have discovered this for themselves. That's right. They have uncovered our profoundest concept
namely, that life is ultimately reading. They themselves are the Book of Books. — Harry Mulisch

All God's revelations are sealed to us until they are opened to us by obedience. You will never get them open by philosophy or thinking. Immediately you obey, a flash of light comes. Let God's truth work in you by soaking in it, not by worrying into it. Obey God in the thing He is at present showing you, and instantly the next thing is opened up. We read tomes on the work of the Holy Spirit when ... five minutes of drastic obedience would make things clear as a sunbeam. We say, "I suppose I shall understand these things some day." You can understand them now: it is not study that does it, but obedience. The tiniest fragment of obedience, and heaven opens up and the profoundest truths of God are yours straight away. God will never reveal more truth about Himself till you obey what you know already. Beware of being wise and prudent. — Oswald Chambers

I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie — Jack London

The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt; they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them out we succeed. — George Santayana

So here I am, my affections torn between a postal service that never feeds me but can tackle a challenge and one that gives me free tape and prompt service but won't help me out when I can't remember a street name. The lesson to draw from this, of course, is that when you move from one country to another you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things worse, and there is nothing you can do about it. That may not be the profoundest of insights to take away from a morning's outing, but I did get a free doughnut as well, so on balance I guess I'm happy. — Bill Bryson

Contempt
The contempt I feel for others - for myself different, less internal than guilt.

It's not that I think (or have ever thought) I was bad - through and through. I think I'm unattractive, unloveable, because I'm incomplete. It's not what I am that's wrong, it's that I'm not more (responsive, alive, generous, considerate, original, sensitive, brave etc.).

My profoundest experience is of indifference, rather than censure. — Susan Sontag

In confession occurs the breakthrough of the Cross. The root of all sin is pride, superbia. I want to be my own law, I have a right to my self, my hatred and my desires, my life and my death. The mind and flesh of man are set on fire by pride; for it is precisely in his wickedness that man wants to be as God. Confession in the presence of a brother is the profoundest kind of humiliation. It hurts, it cuts a man down, it is a dreadful blow to pride ... In the deep mental and physical pain of humiliation before a brother - which means, before God - we experience the Cross of Jesus as our rescue and salvation. The old man dies, but it is God who has conquered him. Now we share in the resurrection of Christ and eternal life. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It is the profoundest of cosmic ironies. The divine power, our true spiritual essence, does not achieve perfection until it hits the 'rock' bottom of the cosmos - the dense and crude earth. It remains imperfect until the moment of entombment for the simple reason that until that dark nadir is reached the experiential adventure of existence remains incomplete, and Self is not yet endowed with the entire spectrum of the light of consciousness - from spirit to matter - from the highest high to the lowest low. — Lon Milo DuQuette

If I am convinced that I will procure the profoundest idea only by undergoing the profoundest pain, I shall beg for strength to endure that pain. — Kedar Joshi

The earliest instinct of the child, and the ripest experience of age, unite in affirming simplicity to be the truest and profoundest part for man. Likewise this simplicity is so universal and all-containing as a rule for human life, that the subtlest bad man, and the purest good man, as well as the profoundest wise man, do all alike present it on that side which they socially turn to the inquisitive and unscrupulous world. — Herman Melville

The profoundest order is revealed in what is most casual. — Fairfield Porter

Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. — Wendell Berry

It shook Therese in the profoundest part of her where no words were, no easy words like death or dying or killing Those words were somehow future, and this was present. An inarticulate anxiety, a desire to know, know anything for certain, had jammed itself in her throat for a moment she felt she could hardly breathe. — Patricia Highsmith

The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand. — Elias Canetti

The way in which a faith community shapes language about God implicity represents what it takes to be the highest good, the profoundest truth, the most appealing beauty ... While officially it is rightly and consistently said that God is spirit and so beyond identification with either male or female sex, yet the daily language of preaching, worship, catechesis, and instruction conveys a different message: God is male, or at least more like a man than a woman, or at least more fittingly addressed as male than as female. — Elizabeth A. Johnson

I should like to insist that nearly all the important questions, the things we ponder in our profoundest moments, have no answers. — Jacquetta Hawkes

If we could have any security against moods! If the profoundest prophet could be holden to his words, and the hearer who is readyto sell all and join the crusade, could have any certificate that to-morrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony! — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pilate's skeptical sneer "What is truth?" was addressed to Truth Himself, standing there right in front of his face. The world's stupidest question was three words; God's profoundest answer was one Word. — Peter Kreeft

Halfpast twelve o'clock came; Turkey began to glow in the face, overturn
his inkstand, and become generally obstreperous; Nippers abated down
into quietude and courtesy; Ginger Nut munched his noon apple; and
Bartleby remained standing at his window in one of his profoundest
dead-wall reveries. — Herman Melville

The style of the Bible in general is singularly adapted to men of every class and grade of culture, affording the child the simple nourishment for its religious wants, and the profoundest thinker inexhaustible matter of study. — Philip Schaff

Does religious conviction provide a powerful reason for killing? Undeniably it often does. It also often provides the sole compelling reason for refusing to kill, or for being merciful, or for seeking peace; only the profoundest ignorance of history could prevent one from recognizing this. For the truth is that religion and irreligion are cultural variables, but killing is a human constant. — David Bentley Hart

I'm also a great believer in the dream life; that while we're asleep, a deep subconscious connection is made about our profoundest fears, hopes, loves, losses, dreads and desires. — Andrew Motion

The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist. — Arthur Schopenhauer

The profoundest distances are never geographical. — John Fowles

Faith marches at the head of the army of progress. -It is found beside the most refined life, the freest government, the profoundest philosophy, the noblest poetry, the purest humanity. — Theodore T. Munger

Philosophy exists in profoundest opposition to rhetoric, which is speaking for the sake of producing or controlling some effect in others' perceptions. Philosophy is about the caustic or cauterizing effect of the truth, not the currying of sensibilities. — Kenny Smith

The profoundest facts in the earth's history prove that the oceans have always been oceans. — James Dwight Dana

The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men. — B.H. Liddell Hart

Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. — John Milton

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don't you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct. — Robert Frost

It strikes everyone in beginning to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature that a land so rich in intellectual products and those of the profoundest order of thought. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity. — Jean Piaget

It hurts to care; the courage to care is the profoundest courage there is. — Julia Hill

The scientist is activated by a wonder and awe before the mysterious comprehensibility of the universe which is yet finally beyond his grasp. In its profoundest depths it is inaccessible to man. — Albert Einstein

The obscurest sayings of the truly great are often those which contain the germ of the profoundest and most useful truths. — Giuseppe Mazzini

At the profoundest depths in life, men talk not about God but with Him. — D. Elton Trueblood

The power of music to integrate and cure ... is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication. — Oliver Sacks

As a matter of fact, with all his wit, humor, raillery, persiflage, he was the profoundest logician that ever appealed to the intellect of an American audience. There was logic even in his laughter. He passed the cup of mirth, and in its sparkling foam were found the gems of unanswerable truth.

{Kittredge on the great Robert Ingersoll} — Herman E. Kittredge

All results of the profoundest mathematical investigation must ultimately be expressible in the simple form of properties of the integers. — Leopold Kronecker

As the profoundest philosophy of ancient Rome and Greece lighted her taper at Israel's altar, so the sweetest strains of the pagan muse were swept from harps attuned on Zion's hill. — Edward Thomson

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. — Albert Einstein

Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a 'science of people' but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities. — Herbert Marcuse

It is the difficult, but unavoidable, task of the modern individual to assimilate consciously all of the contents - from darkest degradation to profoundest purpose - contained in the psyche. — Daniel Pinchbeck

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed. — John Updike

It is very much easier to work than to pray. Most of the missionaries are earnest workers. But are we all that we should be in the matter of prayer? Let us not suppose that just any sort of praying will do for China. We must all wrestle with God. 'I will not let Thee go unless Thou bless China.' It must come to this if the conversion of the Chinese is ever to be an accomplished fact. Such is my conviction. Let me remind you that the greatest importunity is not incompatible with the profoundest submission to the Divine will. — Griffith John

The lesson to draw from this, of course, is that when you move from one country to another you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things that are worse, and there is nothing you can do about it. That may not be the profoundest of insights to take away from a morning's outing , but I did get a free doughnut as well, so on balance I guess I'm happy.
Now if you will excuse me I have to drive to Vermont and collect some mail from a Mr. Bubba. — Bill Bryson

I have the profoundest respect for people who behave in a generous way because of religion. But I come from a country where the misuse of religion has had catastrophic consequences. One must judge people not by what faith they proclaim but by what they do. — Amin Maalouf

When, over the following months, Minta Randall found that Eustace apparently reciprocated her profoundest and most secret feelings, she thought she had never lived before, or knew what life could hold, or what absolute power one heart could exert upon another. She perceived no trace, fossil, or echo of this wild sensation anywhere around her, and concluded that she and Eustace had invented it together, which would be, she thought, just like them. — Annie Dillard

Everything that is profound loves the mask: the profoundest things have a hatred even of figure and likeness. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is the expression of the profoundest thoughts in the simplest way. — Albert Einstein