Quotes & Sayings About Profundity

Black and white are absolute ... expressing the most delicate vibration, the most profound tranquility, and unlimited profundity. — Shiko Munakata

epistemological appreciation of the profundity of what the Internet offers humanity as a model of a learning institution.
To initiate and exemplify this rethinking of virtually enabled and enhanced learning institutions, we used this project to examine potential new models of digital learning. This project, in short, is an experiment. We engaged multiple forms of participatory learning to test the power of "virtual institutions" and to model other ways that virtual, digital institutions can be used for learning. The process itself informed every step of our thinking about new forms of alliances, intellectual networks, — Cathy N. Davidson

You and those shot-glass eyes, deep swirling pools of 80-proof firewater, with the depth and profundity of Saturn's spinning pulsars ... — Brandi L. Bates

The struggle to write with profundity of emotion and at the same time to live like a millionaire so exhausted F. Scott Fitzgerald that he was at last brought down to the point where he could no longer be both a good writer and a decent person. — Nelson Algren

I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word. — Sven Birkerts

You can't learn pathos or profundity. — Nigel Kennedy

Art is about profundity. It's about connecting to everything that it means to be alive, but you have to act. — Jeff Koons

But if we were to simply walk past the fires of racism, sexism, and so on because illusions of separation exist within them, we may well be walking past one of the widest gateways to enlightenment. It is a misinterpretation to suppose that attending to the fires of our existence cannot lead us to experience the waters of peace. Profundity in fact resides in what we see in the world. Spiritual awakening arrives from our ordinary lives, our everyday struggles with each other. It may even erupt from the fear and rage that we tiptoe around. The challenges of race, sexuality, and gender are the very things that the spiritual path to awakening requires us to tend to as aspirants to peace. — Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: ... she knew there was nothing to fear. — Toni Morrison

He steered for me - I had to look after him, I worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became aware of when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory - like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment. — Joseph Conrad

When I read the Upanishads, which are part of Vedanta, I found a profundity of worldview that made my Christianity seem like third grade. — Huston Smith

As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude. — Sigmund Freud

Sometimes it seems' said Grok, 'that the faces exist of themselves, in a disembodied somewhere, waiting for the clown who will wear them, who will bring them to life. Faces that wait in the mirrors of unknown dressing-rooms, unseen in the depths of the glass like fish in dusty pools, fish that will rise up out of the obscure profundity when they spot the one who anxiously scrutinises his own reflection for the face it lacks, man eating fish waiting to gobble up your being and give you another instead ... — Angela Carter

In the moral realm, there is very little consensus left in Western countries over the proper basis of moral behavior. And because of the power of the media, for millions of men and women the only venue where moral questions are discussed and weighed is the talk show, where more often than not the primary aim is to entertain, even shock, not to think. When Geraldo and Oprah become the arbiters of public morality, when the opinion of the latest media personality is sought on everything from abortion to transvestites, when banality is mistaken for profundity because [it's] uttered by a movie star or a basketball player, it is not surprising that there is less thought than hype. Oprah shapes more of the nation's grasp of right and wrong than most of the pulpits in the land. Personal and social ethics have been removed from the realms of truth and structures of thoughts; they have not only been relativized, but they have been democratized and trivialized. — D. A. Carson

I am afraid that old women are more skeptical in their most secret heart of hearts than any man: they believe in the superficiality of existence as in its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them merely a veil over this "truth," a most welcome veil over a pudendum
and so a matter of decency and modesty, and nothing else. — Friedrich Nietzsche

With its claims to profundity, boldness and originality, thinking still limits itself provisionally to the exclusively rational and scientific ... As soon as it lays hold of the feelings, it becomes spirit. — Robert Musil

But things happened the way they happened without regard to our desire for them to have happened another way. Despite an age-old instinct to provide an explanation more complex than that, something with a level of profundity and depth which would seem commensurate with the confusion I felt, it really was that simple. — Kevin Powers

A wise person strives to reach self-transcendence by engaging in delicate contemplation, while avoiding the snare of self-denigration's negative invocation. An overshadowing sense of a caustic self can be destructive, whereas an encircling sense of a kindhearted self allows a person to express the profundity and elation of a feral creature curiously exploring nature's glorious playground. — Kilroy J. Oldster

What good is it for you to be able to discuss the Trinity with great profundity, if you lack humility, and thereby offend the Trinity? Verily, high sounding words do not make one holy and just. But a life of virtue does make one acceptable to God. Were you to memorize the entire Bible and all the sayings of the philosophers, what good would this be for you without the love of God and without grace? Vanity of vanities. All is vanity, except loving God and serving only God.49 — Justo L. Gonzalez

Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity. — Matthew Arnold

We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity. — Cornel West

Jazz music celebrates life! Human life; the range of it, the absurdity of it, the ignorance of it, the greatness of it, the intelligence of it, the sexuality of it, the profundity of it. And it deals with it. In all of its ... It deals with it! — Wynton Marsalis

There is profundity to explore, but also laundry to do. — Bruce Feiler

The real deep text of music and the whole reason that it has continued with the profundity and urgency that it has for over a thousand years, has to do with what the notes say, what the notes witness, different experiences of hope or doubt that people are able to distill and encode and pass on in this way. — Michael Tilson Thomas

Power is no more than a part, no more than the tip of the iceberg of limitless profundity and sublimate of Karate. — Mas Oyama

The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity. — Emile M. Cioran

Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy! — Emil Cioran

It is only the sentimentalist who imagines that the profundity of a person's response to tragedy is proportional to the length, volume, or shrillness of his lamentation. — Theodore Dalrymple

Most of us move through life with little chance to learn much about ourselves. We know some things we like and some things we dislike, we have a few ideas about what makes us happy, and we die in ignorance regarding anything profound within ourselves. — Raymond E. Feist

Speransky, either because he appreciated Prince Andrey's abilities or because he thought it as well to secure his adherence, showed off his calm, impartial sagacity before Prince Andrey, and flattered him with that delicate flattery that goes hand in hand with conceit, and consists in a tacit assumption that one's companion and oneself are the only people capable of understanding all the folly of the rest of the world and the sagacity and profundity of their own ideas. — Leo Tolstoy

Profundity and originality are attributes of single, if not singular, minds. — Edwin Land

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense. — Alfred North Whitehead

I had left the visible, physical blue at the door, outside, in the street. The real blue was inside, the blue of the profundity of space, the blue of my kingdom, of our kingdom! ... the immaterialisation of blue, the coloured space that can not be seen but which we impregnate ourselves with. — Yves Klein

This is no small thing. Indeed, I would venture that, more than any other single quality, it is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting, this draining of the pool of sense impression almost as quickly as it fills, that gives the experience of consciousness under marijuana its peculiar texture. Its helps account for the sharpening of sensory perceptions, for the aura of profundity in which cannabis bathes the most ordinary insights, and, perhaps most important of all, for the sense that time has slowed or even stopped. For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours. And the wonder of that experience, perhaps more than any other, seems to be at the very heart of the human desire to change consciousness, whether by means of drugs or any other technique. — Michael Pollan

Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience, — Andrew Solomon

Well, he thought, you can fool some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time, which is just long enough to be President of the United States, and on that useless profundity, Milligan himself pedalled on, himself, himself. — Spike Milligan

What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells. — H.L. Mencken

Profundity often goes past the issue to some deep but useless truth. — Mason Cooley

The arrival of the Computer Revolution and the founding of the Computer Age has been announced many times. But if the triumph of a revolution is to be measured in terms of the profundity of the social revisions it entrained, then there has been no computer revolution. And however the present age is to be characterized, the computer is not eponymic of it. — Joseph Weizenbaum

A man's profundity may keep him from opening on a first interview, and his caution on a second; but I should suspect his emptiness, if he carried on his reserve to a third. — Charles Caleb Colton

Profundity of thought belongs to youth, clarity of thought to old age. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Only the wise know folly; fools know neither wisdom nor folly. Just as it takes wisdom to know folly, light to know darkness, it takes profundity to know vanity, meaning to know meaninglessness. — Peter Kreeft

I guess I just always want to surprise myself and say something that I'm not really quite sure where it came from, and it sort of makes sense and has a kind of profundity to it. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. — David Shrigley

Profundity fails me." Father Ramon's gaze rested on Loup. "And perhaps that is fitting, since words have never been your strong suit, Loup Garron. I said once that you were neither a leader nor a follower. I think perhaps you're something more rare. A catalyst. A catalyst for change, hope, faith. This group of you, God willing the last of you, have been different. What does it mean to live without fear? What lessons are we to take from your presence among us?" He shook his head. "I don't know. I know only that in your own way, you inspire us. — Jacqueline Carey

I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us. — Daniel Libeskind

Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and profundity. — Matt Ridley

Nothing in life was ever clearly drawn, obviously just, or totally emotionally satisfying, but the moment-to-moment stuff of reality featured infinitely more complication, sleaze, struggle, true beauty, unfairness, profundity, passion, and depth of consciousness than she, in her frantic struggle to be somebody other than her unspectacular self, had been previously aware of. page 302 — Cintra Wilson

You can't live your life in a state of profundity, because you're never going to get anything done, and you're just profound. — Timothy Spall

But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. — Herman Melville

If you practice in accord with your individual capacity, little by little you will find more pleasure and joy in it. As you gain inner strength, your positive actions will gain in profundity and scope. — Dalai Lama

The ordinary American voter does not object to mediocrity. He likes his candidate to be sensible, vigorous, and, above all, what he calls 'magnetic,' and does not value, because he sees no need for, originality or profundity, a fine culture or a wide knowledge. — James Bryce

One of the most beautiful things that recruited me to join the LaRouche movement is its emphasis on Classical singing and composition, especially with the Negro Spirituals, adding a new depth of profundity to songs I had sang while growing up. — Kesha Rogers

Quite possibly, the purpose of the universe is to provide a congenial home for self-conscious creatures who can ask profound questions and who can probe the nature of the universe itself. — Owen Gingerich

The world have payed too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are. — Henry Fielding

Profundity easily turns into dullness and astuteness deteriorates into wit. Be guided by natural common sense and it will accommodate great and small. — Franz Grillparzer

Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative. In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all exhibition of itself is painful. — Thomas Hardy

Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible. — Stephen Nachmanovitch

Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side. — David Lehman

But the world had its layers. To the simple it offered simplicity. To the wise it offered profundity. And the only measure of courage worth acknowledging was found in accepting where one stood in that scheme - in hard, unwavering honesty, no matter how humbling. — Steven Erikson

It is only great pain
that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood
that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us 'better'
but I know that it makes us deeper. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Every day, before our eyes, a moral phenomenon of amazing profundity takes place which is, nevertheless, so simple as never to be noticed. — Honore De Balzac

Could truth perhaps be a woman who has reasons for not permitting her reasons to be seen? Could her name perhaps be
to speak Greek
Baubo? ... Oh, those Greeks! They understood how to live: to do that it is necessary to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore the appearance, to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial
out of profundity! — Friedrich Nietzsche

I believe that music offers us possibilities for analysis, at least in my case, more profound in many ways, but at the same time that profundity is an accessible profundity that has atemporal repercussions. — Bocafloja

A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The unified field theory that ties together Jobs personality and products begins with his most salient trait: his intensity. His silences could be as searing as his rants; he had taught himself to stare without blinking. Sometimes this intensity was charming, in a geeky way, such as when he was explaining the profundity of Bob Dylan's music or why whatever product he was unveiling at that moment was the most amazing thing that Apple had ever made. At other times it could be terrifying, such as when he was fulminating about Google or Microsoft ripping of Apple. — Walter Isaacson

The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants. — Charles Baudelaire

Happiness & Sadness are compeer
in other words,
Sadness is the shadow of happiness
just like that
Happiness is the shadow of sadness
sadness gives Darkness
happiness gives Light
sadness gives Profundity
happiness gives Height
It is always in proportion, that's its balance
If you want happiness, Remember sadness will also come. — Shubham Singh

Chasms are deceived by rumors of their depth. — Marty Rubin

The profundity of Christianity is that Christ is both our redeemer and our judge, not that one is our redeemer and another is our judge, for then we certainly come under judgement, but that the redeemer and the judge are the same. — Soren Kierkegaard

You've traveled up ten thousand steps in search of the truth. So many days in the archives, copying, copying. The gravity of the Tang and the profundity of the Sung make heavy baggage. Here! I've picked you a bunch of wild flowers. Their meaning is the same but they're much easier to carry. — Hsu Yun

One ascends into profundity, but profundity is nothing but a complication of the shallows, and 'one' is nowhere. — Nick Land

I am firmly convinced to-day that, generally speaking, it is in youth that men lay the essential groundwork of their creative thought, wherever that creative thought exists. I make a distinction between the wisdom of age- which can only arise from the greater profundity and foresight that are based on the experiences of a long life- and the creative genius of youth, which blossoms out in thoughts and ideas with inexhaustible fertility, without being able to put these into practice immediately, because of their very superabundance. These furnish the building materials and plans for the future; and it is from them that age takes the stones and builds the edifice, unless the so-called wisdom of the years may have smothered the creative genius of youth. — Adolf Hitler

When the younger son was no longer considered a human being by the people around him, he felt the profundity of his isolation, the deepest loneliness one can experience. He was truly lost, and it was this complete lostness that brought him to his senses. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

By undue profundity, we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue — Edgar Allan Poe

A learned woman might just as well have a beard, for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives. — Immanuel Kant

This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call 'spiritual.' No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. — Sam Harris

Humor and profundity are not mutually exclusive, and life can be, and mostly is, serious and funny simultaneously. It's not always easy to capture that in words, but when T.M. Shine manages to do so, it's a sign of a master at work. — Tom Shroder

Comedy is hostile to profundity, and brings everything to the surface. — Mason Cooley

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity then they really are. — Henry Fielding

Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is. — W. H. Auden

Relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness ... Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart? — Pema Chodron

The endless procession of people and things that forms the world is for me an interminable gallery of pictures whose content bores me. It doesn't interest me because the soul is a monotonous thing and is always the same in everyone; it differs only in its personal manifestations and the best part of it is that which overflows into dreams, into mannerisms and gestures, and thus becomes part of the image that so captures my interest [ ... ] This is how I experience the animate exteriors of things and beings, in pure vision, indifferent as a god from another world to their content, to their spirit. I only go deep into the surface of other people, if I want profundity I look for it in myself and in my concept of things. — Fernando Pessoa

As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own - they even, for God's sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, 'I want to raise some questions about so-and-so', and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys. — David Lodge

We are always and everywhere in the presence of reality. Indeed, the human mind is the most complex and subtle expression of reality we have thus far encountered. This should grant profundity to the humble project of noticing what it is like to be you in the present. However numerous your faults, something in you at this moment is pristine - and only you can recognize it. Open your eyes and see. — Anonymous

I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity. — Ben Lerner

The word nature has given rise to a multitude of errors. Let me repeat that the nature of any being is the sum of the qualities attributed to it by the Creator. With immeasurable profundity, Burke said that art is man's nature. This is beyond doubt; man with all his affections, all his knowledge, all his arts is the true natural man, and the weaver's cloth is as natural as the spider's web. Man's natural state is therefore to be what he is today and what he has always been, that is to say, sociable. All human records attest to this truth.. — Joseph De Maistre

Questions are not happenstance thoughts nor are questions common problems of today which one picks up from hearsay and booklearning and decks out with a gesture of profundity questions grow out of confrontation with the subject matter and the subject matter is there only where eyes are, it is in this manner that questions will be posed and all the more considering that questions that have today fallen out of fashion in the great industry of problems. One stands up for nothing more than the normal running of the industry. Philosophy interprets its corruption as the resurrection of metaphysics. — Martin Heidegger

You still long for freedom, my friend, and that longing is your cage. You do not even realize what you are missing, or what it is that you are longing for, but something in you calls out to be aware. You have become parched in the desert of apathy, and thirst for the Bacchic springs forever out of your reach. And while your highest aspects thirst for freedom, so too your basest roots thrust outwards and strangle the hopes - — James Curcio

Terence McKenna pointed out that the profundity of [halluncinogenic inebriation] and its potential for a positive feedback into the process of reorganizing the personality should have long ago made psychedelics an indispensable tool for psychotherapy. — Rick Doblin

No, I won't leave the world
I'll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn't I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum
don't you think I may end up there? — Soren Kierkegaard

The religious stories, the religious truths, the spiritual principles - obviously, they don't change. But as you get older and you experience more, you recognize the applicability, the profundity, and the fundamental truths of spiritual principles in ways that you couldn't when you simply were living a less dimensional life. — Marianne Williamson

I think there's as much profundity and wisdom in Shakespeare, more so in fact, than those in the Bible. — Steve Coogan

You're working on being a father, so that is something that when you experience it you'll understand the profundity of wanting to protect something dear to you. — Harvey Keitel

Back to the root of the word "profundity," it means insightful and understanding. — Pearl Zhu

makeup that Langdon could see, her complexion appeared unusually smooth, the only blemish a tiny beauty mark just above her lips. Her eyes, though a gentle brown, seemed unusually penetrating, as if they had witnessed a profundity of experience rarely encountered by a person her age. 'Dr. Marconi doesn't speak much English,' she said, sitting down beside him, 'and he asked me to fill out your admittance form.' She gave — Dan Brown

The religion of this 'I', the poetry of this 'I', and the philosophy of the same 'I' that from Poggio and Felelfo to Byron and Goethe produced a number of works astonishing for their profundity and brilliance have finally exhausted its content; and in the poetry of Decadence we see the rapid falling away of the empty shell of this 'I'. We remarked previously about the exaggeration without the exaggerated object, and about the precious style without the subject of this preciosity, which characterize this poetry - this is so in regard to its form; in regard to its content Decadence is above all hopeless egoism. The world, as an object of love, of interest, even as the object of indignation or contempt, has disappeared from this "poetry"; the world has disappeared, not only as an object exciting some reaction in this vapid 'I', but also as a spectator and possible judge of this 'I'; it is not even present.

("On Symbolists And Decadence") — Vasily Rozanov

The remarkable thing about those statements is not the profundity of their sentiments as such, but that they were expressed in the midst of very difficult times for the church. It was attempting to survive and grow even though targeted for sometimes-vicious persecution by a pagan, cruel, anti-Christian government in Rome. Accusations — John F. MacArthur Jr.

With great profundity I note the pleasure one gets or takes in pushing wheeled objects, as opposed to the depression involved in pulling them. — Michael Cisco

Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead.
I shall feel it."
She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:
"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you. — Victor Hugo

Few look for truth; many prowl about for a reputation of profundity by arrogantly challenging whichever arguments are the best. — Rene Descartes