Sublime Life Quotes & Sayings

And the earth itself still turning on its axis and revolving around that sun, the sun revolving around the luminous wheel of this galaxy, the countless unmeasured jewelled wheels of countless unmeasured galaxies, turning, turning, majestically, into infinity, into eternity, through all of which all life ran on - all this, long after she herself was dead, men would still be reading in the night sky, and as the earth turned through those distant seasons, and they watched the constellations still rising, culminating, setting, to rise again - Aries, Taurus, Gemini, the Crab, Leo, Virgo, the Scales and the Scorpion, Capricorn the Sea-goat and Aquarius the Water Bearer, Pisces, and once more, triumphantly, Aries! - would they not, too, still be asking the hopeless eternal question: to what end? What force drives this sublime celestial machinery? — Malcolm Lowry

Certain kinds of people, and a fortiori certain kinds of writers, have always experienced the world around them in the Gothic manner, I'm almost positive. Perhaps there was even some little stump of an apeman who witnessed prehistoric lightning as it parried with prehistoric blackness in a night without rain, and felt his soul rise and fall at the same time to behold this sublime and terrifying conflict. Perhaps such displays provided inspiration for those very first imaginings that were not born of our daily life of crude survival, who knows? Could this be why all our primal mythologies are Gothic - that is, fearsome, fantastical, and inhuman? — Thomas Ligotti

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. — Milan Kundera

When a warrior fights not for himself, but for his brothers, when his most passionately sought goal is neither glory nor his own life's preservation, but to spend his substance for them, his comrades, not to abandon them, not to prove unworthy of them, then his heart truly has achieved contempt for death, and with that he transcends himself and his actions touch the sublime. — Steven Pressfield

Safely connected to my life, and reassured of my essential goodness, I feel at ease, at home, really in the most sublime of homes. [p. 58] — Sylvia Boorstein

This is all I ever wanted - to help students and artists see myth as a reflection of the one sublime adventure of life, and then to breathe new life into it. — Joseph Campbell

The seeking of a mate shall be undertaken with due preparation and care. A life-bond should never be contemplated as a light thing
unlike a legal union or sanctified joining, the sealing of souls CANNOT be severed. When a mate is SOULBOUND to another
LIFEMATED, as some have come to regard it
a mystery is engaged. In one aspect mystical, the lifemating process is the most sublime endeavor that a Refarian may assume. Once formed, the bond must be ever cherished and nurtured by the process of lifelong rigor. — Deidre Knight

Stare - really stare - into the womb of creation, and it will be impossible to dedicate your life to mindless accumulation. When you see the aurora, the only logical choice you can make is to spend the rest of your life seeking the sublime. — Ken Ilgunas

Let us become thoroughly sensible of the weakness, blindness, and narrow limits of human reason: Let us duly consider its uncertainty and endless contrarieties, even in subjects of common life and practice ... When these topics are displayed in their full light, as they are by some philosophers and almost all divines; who can retain such confidence in this frail faculty of reason as to pay any regard to its determinations in points so sublime, so abstruse, so remote from common life and experience? — David Hume

However strange his destiny may be, it is also sublime! I myself have understood that much. Did I not also live this unnatural life for ten months? Thus, to that question asked six thousand years ago by Ecclesiastes, 'That which is far off, and exceedingly deep, who can find it out?' only two men now have the right to answer: Captain Nemo and myself. — Jules Verne

Beauty and happiness and life are all the same and they are pervasive, unattached and abstract and they are our only concern. They are immeasurable, completely lacking in substance. They are perfect and sublime. This is the subject matter of art. — Agnes Martin

Life is a gift that must be given back and joy should arise from its possession. It's too damn short and that's a fact. Hard to accept this earthly procession to final darkness is a journey done, circle completed, work of art sublime, a sweet melodic rhyme. A battle won. — Dean Koontz

[Buddhism and Christianity] are in one sense parallel and equal; as a mound and a hollow, as a valley and a hill. There is a sense in which that sublime despair is the only alternative to that divine audacity. It is even true that the truly spiritual and intellectual man sees it as sort of dilemma; a very hard and terrible choice. There is little else on earth that can compare with these for completeness. And he who does not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha. — G.K. Chesterton

What is the world, except that which we feel? Love, and hope, and delight, or sorrow and tears; these are our lives, our realities, to which we give the names of power, possession, misfortune, and death. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The sublime moment seems to be only a product of allowing yourself to get through, to get to a lot of stuff in your life, write about a lot of stuff and not edit yourself. That is a great lesson to learn for anybody that writes or creates in anyway, to be able to make something without being good or bad. — Jeff Tweedy

Maybe I would like to see beauty again before I die." "Bah. What would you carve? What would you see before you die? What could be worth your life?" "Man's nobility - the most sublime form of beauty. — Terry Goodkind

Love, she told herself, would one day release her from this spell of unreality. She was persuaded that the sublime passion was the key to the enigma; but it was difficult to relate her conception of love to the forms it wore in her experience. Two or three of the girls she had envied for their superior acquaintance with the arts of life had contracted, in the course of time, what were variously described as "romantic" or "foolish" marriages; one even made a runaway match, and languished for a while under a cloud of social reprobation. Here, then, was passion in action, romance converted to reality; yet the heroines of these exploits returned from them untransfigured, and their husbands were as dull as ever when one had to sit next to them at dinner. Her own case, of course, would be different. — Edith Wharton

Normality is like a home to us and everyday life a mother. After a long incursion into great poetry, into the mountains of sublime aspiration, the cliffs of the transcendent and the occult, it is the sweetest thing, savouring of all that is warm in life, to return to the inn where the happy fools laugh and joke, to join with them in their drinking, as foolish as they are, just as God made us, content with the universe that was given us, and to leave the rest to those who climb mountains and do nothing when they reach the top. — Fernando Pessoa

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it? — Lord Byron

Last hopeless chances have got to work. Nothing makes sense otherwise. You might as well not be alive. — Terry Pratchett

Shakespeare's plays were a great Teutonic Valhalla with brilliant sunshine at times and violent tempests at others. The world to him was a battlefield, but his sense of poetic justice, his sublime faith in life and its infinite resources, guided the battles. — Bjornstjerne Bjornson

What is important is not the length of life, but the depth of life. What is important is not to make life longer, but to take your soul out of time, as every sublime act does — Leo Tolstoy

There are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There's the Unknowable Creative Principle---one believes in That. And there's the Sum of altruism in man---naturally one believes in That...The sublime poem of the Christ life was man's attempt to join those two irreconcilable conceptions of God. And since the Sum of human altruism was as much a part of the Unknowable Creative Principle as anything else in Nature and the Universe, a worse link might have been chosen after all! Funny---how one went through life without seeing it in that sort of way! — John Galsworthy

When I speak of a religion of one's own, I'm not talking about a selfish, ego-centered, loosely patched together spiritual concoction. I'm recommending a courageous, deep-seated, fate-driven, informed, and intelligent life that has sublime and transcendent dimension. It can be shared in a community. It can be accomplished inside or outside a traditional religious organization. It is suitable for pious members of a religious group and for agnostics and atheists. To be religious even in a personal way, you have to wake up and find your own portals to wonder and transcendence. — Thomas Moore

Death seemed to lose its terrors and to borrow a grace and dignity in sublime keeping with the life that was ebbing away. — Charles Bracelen Flood

My friends, nothing in all the world is so much worth thinking of as God, Christ, the Bible, sin and salvation, the divine purposes for humankind, life everlasting. But you cannot challenge the dedicated thinking of this generation to these sublime themes upon any such terms as are laid down by an intolerant church. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

You start with the sublime and end up in an alley jerking away for dear life. — Henry Miller

It was my good fortune to be linked with Mme. Curie through twenty years of sublime and unclouded friendship. I came to admire her human grandeur to an ever growing degree. Her strength, her purity of will, her austerity toward herself, her objectivity, her incorruptible judgement - all these were of a kind seldom found joined in a single individual ... The greatest scientific deed of her life - proving the existence of radioactive elements and isolating them - owes its accomplishment not merely to bold intuition but to a devotion and tenacity in execution under the most extreme hardships imaginable, such as the history of experimental science has not often witnessed. — Albert Einstein

Man to woman; man to man in letter words will stand
the philosophy of coming in along by the bay of hay
made so sublime be that it outlasts the coming time. — Richard Mc Sweeney

I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untravelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion. — George Santayana

Suicide! But, if it is the strength of those who no longer have anything, it is the hope of all those who no longer believe, is the sublime value of the vanquished! Yeah, there's a door at least in this life, we can always open it and move on to the other side. The nature has had a movement of mercy; we have not been imprisoned. Thank you on behalf of the desperate! — Guy De Maupassant

At that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements — Charles Dickens

And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks — Tom Robbins

It's been written that the most sublime figure in American history was George Washington on his knees in the snow at Valley Forge. He personified a people who knew that it was not enough to depend on their own courage and goodness, that they must also seek help from God - their Father and preserver. Where did we begin to lose sight of that noble beginning, of our conviction that standards of right and wrong do exist and must be lived up to? Do we really think that we can have it both ways, that God will protect us in a time of crisis even as we turn away from him in our day-to-day life? — Ronald Reagan

In the earliest times of the discovery of the faculty of judgment, every new judgment was a find. The worth of this find rose, the more practical and fertile the judgment was. Verdicts which now seem to us very common then still demanded an unusual level of intellectual life. One had to bring genius and acuity together in order to find new relations using the new tool. Its application to the most characteristic, interesting, and general aspects of humanity necessarily aroused exceptional admiration and drew the attention of all good minds to itself. In this way those bodies of proverbial sayings came into being that have been valued so highly at all times and among all peoples. It would easily be possible for the discoveries of genius we make today to meet with a similar fate in the course of time. There could easily come a time when all that would be as common as moral precepts are now, and new, more sublime discoveries would occupy the restless spirit of men. — Novalis

See how small your are next to the mountains. Accept what is bigger that you and what you do not understand. The world may appear illogical to you, but it does not follow that it is illogical per se. Our life is not the measure of all things: consider sublime places a reminder of human insignificance and frailty. — Alain De Botton

No thing worth while is obtained in this life without sacrificing, without putting forth effort. The evil one thrusts things upon us but God asks us to reach out and get that which he offers. "Teach self-denial," says Walter Scott, "and make it pleasurable, and you create for the world a destiny more sublime than ever issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer. — David O. McKay

To stroll is a science, it is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live ... To stroll is to enjoy, it is to assume a mind-set, it is to admire the sublime pictures of unhappiness, of love, of joy, of graceful or grotesque portraits; it is to plunge one's vision to the depths of a thousand existences: young, it is to desire everything; old, it is to live the life of the young, to marry their passions. — Honore De Balzac

The human mind may know God, and learn of God, though it has no terms by which to explain Him; it may think of Him as Absolute, as Infinite, as Personal, while it may never in this life be able to fathom the full meaning of these sublime ideas. — George C. Lorimer

Did I learn anything? No way. But all the things you want to learn from
grief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn. There are no revelations, no wisdoms as a trade-off for the things you have lost. You
just get stupider, more selfish. Colder and grimmer. You forget your keys. You leave the house and panic that you won't remember where you live.
You know less than you ever did. You keep crossing thresholds of grief and you think, Maybe this one will unveil some sublime truth about life and
death and pain. But on the other side, there's just more grief. — Rob Sheffield

At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It insists on the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one's life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime; to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing. — Barack Obama

With every rising of the sun, Think of your life as just begun. The past has shrived and buried deep All yesterdays; there let them sleep. Concern yourself with but today, Woo it, and teach it to obey Your will and wish. Since time began Today has been the friend of man; But in his blindness and his sorrow, He looks to yesterday and tomorrow. You, and today! a soul sublime, And the great pregnant hour of time, With God himself to bind the twain! Go forth, I say-attain, attain! With God himself to bind the twain! — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

What can be more excellent than prayer; what is more profitable to our life; what sweeter to our souls; what more sublime, in the course of our whole life, than the practice of prayer! — Saint Augustine

Life is not mean, it is grand; if it is mean to any, he or she makes it so. God made it glorious. It is paved with diamonds; its banks he fringed with flowers. He overarched it with stars. Around it He spread the glory of the physical universe-suns, moon, worlds, constellations, systems-all that is magnificent in motion, sublime in magnitude, and grand in order and obedience. God would not have attended life with this broad march of grandeur if it did not mean something. — Orison Swett Marden

Myth is the practical metabolism of our soulish life, the logic of our obsessions and oversights for which we have no language or code. Myth is the "morality" that the ineffable puts upon us, our unaccountable imperatives, our inexplicably selective clarity and obscurity, the mortal one-sidedness of our talents and wits, the passion and apathy that make such a transient passage through our hapless minds; that weave a pattern of fatality others will see before we do. Myth is distinctively human or sublime higher-order instinct, the "reason" in culture that reason knows not of. — Kenny Smith

The sublime beauty was almost hidden withing the castle walls. She believed that the treasured things in life were often hard to find - a pearl in an oyster shell, a kind word in the heat of the moment. — F.C. Malby

Trauma and pain are the foundations of art. I believe that. When tragedy strikes, however, a muralist or a watercolorist has the opportunity to be a human being in the moment and an artist afterward. Faced with the death of a loved one, a sculptor or portraitist can first grieve, suffer, and heal--then create. Most artists go through life this way. They can react normally to the trials and tribulations of the human experience. They can pass through the world with compassion and comradeship. They can make their art later. Outside, elsewhere, beyond. But photography is immediate. It does not offer the luxury of time. Faced with blood, death, or transformation, a photographer has no choice but to reach for the camera. An artist first, a human being afterward. Photography is a neutral record of all events, a chronicle of things both sublime and terrible. By necessity, this work is made without emotion, without connection, without love. — Abby Geni

The case is very plain before me. In leaving England, I should leave a loved but empty land - Mr. Rochester is not there; and if he were, what is, what can that ever be to me? My business is to live without him now: nothing so absurd, so weak as to drag on from day to day, as if I were waiting some impossible change in circumstances, which might reunite me to him. Of course (as St. John once said) I must seek another interest in life to replace the one lost: is not the occupation he now offers me truly the most glorious man can adopt or God assign? Is it not, by its noble cares and sublime results, the one best calculated to fill the void left by uptorn affections and demolished hopes? I believe I must say, Yes - and yet I shudder. — Charlotte Bronte

Elegance is a glowing inner peace. Grace is an ability to give as well as to receive and be thankful. Mystery is a hidden laugh always ready to surface! Glamour only radiates if there is a sublime courage & bravery within: glamour is like the moon; it only shines because the sun is there. — C. JoyBell C.

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills. — George Eliot

Beauty surrounds us, but oftentimes it takes a person with a poetic perception, an artist's way of looking at the world, to first notice the sublime, and then stagecraft the splendor of nature so that other people can perceive their synoptic vision. The spirit and aesthetic intention behind the work is what assigns the work its artistic quality. Great works of poetry and writing, for instance, express not simply a criticism of life, but also encompass a philosophy for living. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Human life is precious, sublime and meaningful. But by involvement in purely worldly pursuits, the greatness of human birth is forgotten. Without human values, life is meaningless. When there is purity in thought, word and deed, human values are practised. The unity of the three H's is essential. 'Heart, Head and Hand. ' But today this unity is absent among people, with the result that men are becoming inhuman. — Sathya Sai Baba

I like to watch an old boatman rowing, especially one who has been hired by the hour. There is something so beautifully calm and restful about his method. It is so free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life. He is not for ever straining himself to pass all the other boats. If another boat overtakes him and passes him it does not annoy him; as a matter of fact, they all do overtake him and pass him - all those that are going his way. This would trouble and irritate some people; the sublime equanimity of the hired boatman under the ordeal affords us a beautiful lesson against ambition and uppishness. Plain — Jerome K. Jerome

In the end, the creators of Narnia and Middle-earth offer a vision of human life that is at once terrifying and sublime. They insist that every soul is caught up in an epic story of sacrifice and courage and clashing armies: the Return of the King. It is the day when every heart will be laid bare. We will know, with inexpressible joy or unspeakable sorrow, whether we have chosen Light or Darkness. — Joseph Loconte

Our concerns sink into insignificance when compared with the eternal value of human personality - a potential child of God which is destined to triumph over lie, pain, and death. No one can take this sublime meaning of life away from us, and this is the one thing that matters. — Igor Sikorsky

Kenny is a drug, and I've just had the best hit of my life. I'm not losing this addiction. I'm in, all the way, pledging my voluntarily servitude to the gateway of my desire. Kenny was the freedom I was longing for. Love and all this wild pent up desire, proved to be the combination that set me free. But only Kenny had the power to unleash me. She scrubbed the impurity from my life and washed clean the world, so I could see it stark and clear for the very first time. Kenny perfumed my existence with her regal charm, her sovereign splendor. Kenny is in everyway sublime. — Addison Moore

All through his life, he swung between the ridiculous and the sublime, — Marshall McLuhan

To make a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life. — Robert Burns

We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life. Though you have but a little room, do you fancy that God is not there, too, and it is impossible to live therein a life that shall be somewhat lofty? Do you imagine that you can possibly be alone, that love can be a thing one knows, a thing one sees; that events can be weighed like the gold and silver of ransom? — Maurice Maeterlinck

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must write dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. — Ray Bradbury

The most sublime efforts of philosophy can extend no farther than feebly to point out the desire, the hope, or, at most, the probability, of a future state, there is nothing, except a divine revelation, that can ascertain the existence, and describe the condition of the invisible country which is destined to receive the souls of men after their separation from the body. — Edward Gibbon

Attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that — Charles Dickens

In fact, however, Nietzsche's very first book, The Birth, constitutes a declaration of independence from Schopenhauer: while Nietzsche admires him for honestly facing up to the terrors of existence, Nietzsche himself celebrates Greek tragedy as a superior alternative to Schopenhauer's "Buddhistic negation of the will." From tragedy Nietzsche learns that one can affirm life as sublime, beautiful, and joyous in spite of all suffering and cruelty. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner - for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable. (Moby Dick chap 35 p 153) — Herman Melville

When the life of the nation was attempted, when the cause of liberty and human rights called for their aid, they rushed forth to rally under the banner they loved, with grand singleness of purpose and heroic devotion
leaving all behind them, to meet toil and danger, hunger, sickness, wounds, and death, for nothing but the sublime satisfaction of doing their duty to their country and to mankind. — Carl Schurz

I'd like to say I found a sublime beauty in it all, but I didn't. And yet. And yet, this life we'd built filled our car — Dennis Lehane

He could now see his life opening before him, uncomplex and inescapable as a barren corridor, completely freed now of ever again having to think or decide, the burden which he now assumed and carried as bright and weightless and martial as his insignatory brass: a sublime and implicit faith in physical courage and blind obedience, and a belief that the white race is superior to any and all other races and that the American is superior to all other white races and that the American uniform is superior to all men, and that all that would ever be required of him in payment for this belief, this privilege, would be his own life. — William Faulkner

He could focus my attention on how perfectly sublime life can be at times. Such moments are ephemeral, and without his guidance I might have missed many of them, working so hard to get somewhere that I would fail to recognize when I had arrived. — Kevin Hearne

For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we only were. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hate wise men because they are lazy, cowardly, and prudent. To the philosophers' equanimity, which makes them indifferent to both pleasure and pain, I prefer devouring passions. The sage knows neither the tragedy of passion, nor the fear of death, nor risk and enthusiasm, nor barbaric, grotesque, or sublime heroism. He talks in proverbs and gives advice. He does not live, feel, desire, wait for anything. He levels down all the incongruities of life and then suffers the consequences. So much more complex is the man who suffers from limitless anxiety. The wise man's life is empty and sterile, for it is free from contradiction and despair. An existence full of irreconcilable contradictions is so much richer and creative. The wise man's resignation springs from inner void, not inner fire. I would rather die of fire than of void. — Emil Cioran

The Divine may come to life in individual man, may reveal itself from within individual man; but it attains its earthly fullness only where, having awakened to an awareness of their universal being, individual beings open themselves to one another, disclose themselves to one another, help one another; where immediacy is established between one human being and another; where the sublime stronghold of the individual is unbolted, and man breaks free to meet other man. Where this takes place, where the eternal rises in the Between, the seemingly empty space: that true place of realization is community, and true community is that relationship in which the Divine comes to its realization between man and man. These — Martin Buber

Every time, it's the same thing, I feel like crying, my throat goes all tight and I do the best I can to control myself but sometimes it gets close: I can hardly keep myself from sobbing. So when they sing a canon I look down at the ground because it's just too much emotion at once: it's too beautiful, and everyone singing together, this marvelous sharing. I'm no longer myself. I am just one part of a sublime whole, to which the others also belong, and I always wonder at such moments why this cannot be the rule of everyday life, instead of being an exceptional moment, during a choir. — Muriel Barbery

The novelist Thomas Wolfe, recalling a lifelong struggle with illness, wrote in his last letter, "I've made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I've seen the dark man very close." I had not made the journey myself, and I had only seen the darkness reflected in the eyes of others. But surely, it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from the strange country - to see them so very close, clambering back. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

This is the status of the Bible in modern life: it is a sublime answer, but we do not know the question any more. Unless we recover the question, there is no hope of understanding the Bible. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

He had no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and speculative thinking, but by the bedside of patients the direct external calls on his judgment and sympathies brought the added impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It was not simply that beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly - it was a perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of thought, and on the consideration of another's need and trial. Many of us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we have ever known has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact, directed by deeply-informed perception, has come to us in our need with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers. Some of that twice-blessed mercy was always with Lydgate in his work at the Hospital or in private houses, serving better than any opiate to quiet and sustain him under anxieties and his sense of mental degeneracy. — George Eliot

The study of everything that stands connected with the death of Christ, whether it be in the types of the ceremonial law, the predictions of the prophets, the narratives of the gospels, the doctrines of the epistles, or the sublime vision of the Apocalypse, this is the food of the soul, the manna from heaven, the bread of life. This is "meat indeed" and "drink indeed. — John Angell James

... the worshipers here are not likely to kill one another, they all offer the same sacrifice, and how the fat spits and the carcasses sizzle as God in the sublime heavens inhales the odors of all this carnage with satisfaction. Jesus pressed his lamb to his breast, unable to fathom why God could not be appeased with a cup of milk poured over His altar, that sap of life which passes from one being to another, or with a handful of wheat, the basic substance of immortal bread. Soon he will have to part with the old man's generous gift, his for such a short time, the poor little lamb will not live to see the sun set this day, it is time to mount the stairs of the Temple, to deliver it to the knife and sacrificial fire, as if it were no longer worthy of existence or being punished ... — Jose Saramago

The mountain is not something eternally sublime; it has a great historic and spiritual meaning to us. It stands for us as the ladder of life. Nay, more; it is the ladder of the soul and in a curious way the source of religion. From it came the Law, from it came the Gospel in the Sermon of the Mount. We may trul say that the highest religion is the Religion of the Mountain. — Jan Smuts

It is known that the Quran leaves an analytical reader the impression of disarrangement, and that it seems to be a compound of diverse elements. Nevertheless, the Quran is life, not literature. Islam is a way of living rather than a way of thinking. The only authentic comment of the Quran can be life, and as we know, it was the life of the prophet Muhammad. Islam is in its written form (the Quran) may seem disorderly, but in the life of Muhammad it proves itself to be a natural union of love and force, the sublime and the real, the divine and the human. This explosive compound of religion and politics produced enormous force in the life of the peoples who accepted it. In one moment, Islam has coincided with the very essence of life. — Alija Izetbegovic

In his theory of the sublime, eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke proposes the notion of "negative pain": the idea that a feeling of fear - paired with a sense of safety, and the ability to look away - can produce a feeling of delight. One woman can sit on her couch with a glass of Chardonnay and watch another woman drink away her life. — Leslie Jamison

She has the kind of beauty that takes your breath from your lungs, tears from your eyes and speeds your heart each time you look at her.

She has the kind of beauty reserved for works of art, where men spend years of their life mastering their craft to replicate.

She is beauty, stunning, transcendent, right down through to the bone, the unfathomable depth of her heart.

She is Muse. She is wonder. She is sublime. — Kirk Diedrich

In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential. — James Russell Lowell

Love is the spirit that motivates the artist's journey. The love may sublime, raw, obsessive, passionate, awful. or thrilling, but whatever its quality, it's a powerful motive in the artist's life. — Eric Maisel

He was at that period of life when the mind of men who think is composed, in nearly equal parts, of depth and ingenuousness. A grave situation being given, he had all that is required to be stupid: one more turn of the key, and he might be sublime. — Victor Hugo

Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves. — Alain De Botton

Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. — Leo Tolstoy

Her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. — Charles Dickens

God has frequently to knock the bottom board out of your experience if you are a saint in order to get you into contact with Himself. God wants you to understand this is a life of faith, not a life of sentimental enjoyment of His blessings ... "Though He slay me yet will I trust Him" - this is the most sublime utterance of faith in the whole of the Bible. — Oswald Chambers

And I no longer even know where the source is; at present, everything looks the same. The landscape is more and more gentle, amiable, joyous; my skin hurts. I am at the heart of the abyss. I feel my skin again as a frontier, and the external world as a crushing weight. The impression of separation is total; from now on I am imprisoned within myself. It will not take place, the sublime fusion; the goal of life is missed. It is two in the afternoon. — Michel Houellebecq

Mormon prophets have continuously taught the sublime truth that God the Eternal Father was once a mortal man who passed through a school of earth life similar that through which we are now passing. He became God - an exalted being - through obedience to the same eternal Gospel truths that we are given opportunity today to obey. — Milton R. Hunter

Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London — Charles Dickens

Such philosophy as shall not vanish in the fume of subtile, sublime, or delectable speculation but shall be operative to the endowment and betterment of man's life. — Francis Bacon

Always. At every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought of Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The habit of thinking of ourselves as sublime, or having a lofty conception of our possibilities, of imagining ourselves as being commanded by the Almighty to do a great work on this earth, of thinking of ourselves as not only human but divine, gods in the making, because we are a product of Divinity, will help us wonderfully to grasp the higher meaning of life and do the thing worth while. — Orison Swett Marden

Love happens sublimely, serenely and accidentally! It will happen when you least expect it to! — Avijeet Das

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling. — Albert Einstein

What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky. — Victor Hugo

So important , indeed, is it (Light), and so much does it pervade with its influence the whole Masonic system, that Freemasonry itself anciently received, among other appellations, that of Lux, or Light, to signify that it is to be regarded as that sublime doctrine of Divine Truth by which the path of him who has attained it is to be illuminated in his pilgrimage of life. — Albert Mackey

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event. — David Pearce

I have heard great music--even sublime music. I've heard music fit for princes, for kings. I have hard music fit for any monarch. But that night, for the first time in my life, I heard music fit for God. — J. Scott Featherstone