Quotes & Sayings About Sublime Nature

I enjoyed this scene; and yet my enjoyment was embittered both by the memory of the past, and the anticipation of the future. I was formed for peaceful happiness. During my youthful days discontent never visited my mind; and if I was ever overcome by ennui, the sight of what is beautiful in nature, or the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man, could always interest my heart, and communicate elasticity to my spirits. But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit, what I shall soon cease to be
a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others, and intolerable to myself. — Mary Shelley

[W]hile our souls are meager, nature has surplus. Yet something of the mechanism's subject was indeed dissolved in that silver chloride, flattened then minted as those promiscuous postcards we saw now, which we could not now unsee, for we had accepted unawares a bit of the Canyon each time we saw a photograph of it, and those pieces, filtered and diluted, had accumulated in us, so that we never saw anything for the first time. Perhaps the ugliest of our impulses, to shove the sublime through a pinhole. — Claire Vaye Watkins

For thousands of years, it had been nature
and its supposed creator
that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.
But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs ... Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves. — Alain De Botton

But when on shore, & wandering in the sublime forests, surrounded by views more gorgeous than even Claude ever imagined, I enjoy a delight which none but those who have experienced it can understand - If it is to be done, it must be by studying Humboldt. — Charles Darwin

And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting -
In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural. — Alberto Caeiro

When tenderness softened her heart, and the sublime feeling of universal love penetrated her, she found no voice that replied so well to hers as the gentle singing of the pines under the air of noon, and the soft murmurs of the breeze that scattered her hair and freshened her cheek, and the dashing of the waters that has no beginning or end. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

[She] soon perceived that as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women were also wandering in their gait ... Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they. — Thomas Hardy

The sublime can only be found in the great subjects. Poetry, history and philosophy all have the same object, and a very great object - Man and Nature. Philosophy describes and depicts Nature. Poetry paints and embellishes it. It also paints men, it aggrandizes them, it exaggerates them, it creates heroes and gods. History only depicts man, and paints him such as he is. — Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon

Yet nature turns a dumb face toward us like a cow. When we read its wonders, we wonder whether we haven't written them ourselves. We are in ferment, but our greatness grows like a bubble of froth. We sense that existence itself lacks substance; that it is serious in the wrong sense; that its heaviness is that of wet air. The sublime ... ah, the sublime is far off, though we call for its coming. Yes. Life falls short
it is never what it should be. Rhymes will not rescue it. Days end, and begin again, automatically. Only the clock connects them. Sullen sunshine is followed by pitiless frost, and the consequence is we are a tick or two nearer oblivion, and the alarm for our unwaking. — William H Gass

The elements that unite to make the Grand Canyon the most sublime spectacle in nature are multifarious and exceedingly diverse. — John Wesley Powell

Horse Frightened by a Lion depicts a majestic stallion in a very different situation. Stubbs painted this magnetic masterpiece to illustrate the nature of the sublime, which was one of his era's most popular philosophical concepts,and its relation to a timelessly riveting feeling: fear. The magnificent horse galloping through a vast wilderness encounters the bottom-up stimulus of a crouching predator and responds with a dramatic display of what psychologists mildly call "negative emotion." The equine superstar's arched neck, dilated eyes, and flared nostrils are in fact the very picture of overwhelming dread. The painting's subject matter reflects he philosopher Edmund Burke's widely circulated Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which asserts that because "terror" is unparalleled in commanding "astonishment," or total, single-pointed,
indeed, rapt
attention, it is "the ruling principle of the sublime. — Winifred Gallagher

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

Under the sublime law of progress, the present outgrows the past. The great heart of humanity is heaving with the hopes of a brighter day. All the higher instincts of our nature prophesy its approach; and the best intellects of the race are struggling to turn that prophecy into fulfilment. — Horace Mann

Once the creator was removed from the creation, divinity became only a remote abstraction, a social weapon in the hands of the religious institutions. This split in public values produced or was accompanied by, as it was bound to be, an equally artificial and ugly division in people's lives, so that a man, while pursuing Heaven with the sublime appetite he thought of as his soul, could turn his heart against his neighbors and his hands against the world ...
Though Heaven is certainly more important than the earth if all they say about it is true, it is still morally incidental to it and dependent on it, and I can only imagine it and desire it in terms of what I know of the earth.
(pg. 23, "A Native Hill") — Wendell Berry

I'd forgotten how enlivening it could feel, seeing clearly and far. Aridity frees light. It also unleashes grandeur. The earth here wasn't cloaked in forest, nor draped in green. Green was pastoral, peaceful, mild. Desert beauty was "sublime" in the way that the romantic poets had used the word- not peaceful dales but rugged mountain faces, not reassuring but daunting nature, the earth's skin and haunches, its spines and angles arching prehistorically in sunlight. — Julene Bair

Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion! — Boris Pasternak

Nature - the sublime, the harsh, and the beautiful - offers something that the street or gated community or computer game cannot. — Richard Louv

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer. — Victor Hugo

The greater is the circle of light, the greater is the boundary of the darkness by which it is confined. But, notwithstanding this, the more light get, the more thankful we ought to be, for by this means we have the greater range for satisfactory contemplation. time the bounds of light will be still farther extended; and from the infinity of the divine nature, and the divine works, we may promise ourselves an endless progress in our investigation them: a prospect truly sublime and glorious. — Joseph Priestley

The flowers that we see all around us are beautiful, beautiful is the rising of the morning sun, beautiful are the variegated hues of nature. The whole universe is beautiful, and man has been enjoying it since his appearance on earth. Sublime and awe-inspiring are the mountains; the gigantic rushing rivers rolling towards the sea, the trackless deserts, the infinite ocean, the starry heavens - all these are awe-inspiring, sublime, and beautiful indeed. — Swami Vivekananda

There has never been a book like this. At once a poetics of place, a work of deep history, a bildungsroman, and an acute inquiry into the big subjects: love, family, other animals, the nature of creativity. It is sublime. It's also very funny. Haunting and haunted, Hold Still is the memoir of an artist that is art itself. — Melissa Holbrook Pierson

Water is an individual, an animal, and is alive, remove the hydrogen and it is an animal and is alive; the remaining oxygen is also an individual, an animal, and is alive. Recapitulation: the two individuals combined, constitute a third individual-and yet each continues to be an individual ... here was mute Nature explaining the sublime mystery of the Trinity so luminously that even the commonest understanding could comprehend it, whereas many a trained master of words had labored to do it with speech and failed. — Mark Twain

It is that faculty by which we discover and enjoy the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime in literature, art, and nature; which recognizes a noble thought, as a virtuous mind welcomes a pure sentiment by a involuntary glow of satisfaction. But while the principle of perception is inherent in the soul, it requires a certain amount of knowledge to draw out and direct it. — Robert Aris Willmott

How sublime Upon a time-blanch'd cliff to muse, and, while The eagle glories in a sea of air, To mingle with the scene around! - Survey The sun-warm heaven ... — Robert Montgomery

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere. — Guillaume Apollinaire

But there are also remarkable differences between the two. The Beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having boundaries. The Sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by occasion of it boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought. Thus the Beautiful seems to be regarded as the presentation of an indefinite concept of Understanding; the Sublime as that of a like concept of Reason. Therefore the satisfaction in the one case is bound up with the representation of quality, in the other with that of quantity. — Immanuel Kant

Kant argued that, where nature could be considered beautiful in her acts of destruction, human violence appeared instead as monstrous. However, a misreading of Kant in Romantic philosophy led to the idealization of the murderer as a sublime genius that has colored constructions of that criminal figure ever since. — Richard Marshall

Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life
birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science. In attempting to do this, creationists have missed the significance, meaning, and sublime nature of myths. They took a beautiful story of creation and re-creation and ruined it. — Michael Shermer

Her mighty lakes, like oceans of liquid silver; her mountains, with bright aerial tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; her broad, deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling with the magic of summer clouds and glorious sunshine - no, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery. — Washington Irving

[When nature appears complicated:] The moment we contemplate it as it is, and attain a position from which we can take a commanding view, though but of a small part of its plan, we never fail to recognize that sublime simplicity on which the mind rests satisfied that it has attained the truth. — John Herschel

First, I think it proper to express my unshaken opinion of the immortality of my soul or mind; and to dedicate and devote the same to the supreme head of the Universe - to that great and tremendous Jehovah, - Who created the universal frame of nature, worlds, and systems in number infinite ... To this awfully sublime Being do I resign my spirit with unlimited confidence of His mercy and protection ... — Henry Knox

We will simply say here that, as a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer art. Rubens so understood it, doubtless, when it pleased him to introduce the hideous features of a court dwarf amid his exhibitions of royal magnificence, coronations and splendid ceremonial.
The universal beauty which the ancients solemnly laid upon everything, is not without monotony; the same impression repeated again and again may prove fatiguing at last. Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.
On the other hand, the grotesque seems to be a halting-place, a mean term, a starting-point whence one rises toward the beautiful with a fresher and keener perception. The salamander gives relief to the water-sprite; the gnome heightens the charm of the sylph. — Victor Hugo

Sublime places gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming. But it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time in them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust. — Alain De Botton

For our soul is raised out of nature through the truly sublime, sways with high spirits, and is filled with proud joy, as if itself had created what it hears. — Longinus

[On Chopin's Preludes:]
His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky ... The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power. — George Sand

The philosophical study of beauty, art, and the splendor of nature nurtures a person's fertile mind by exposing a person to the puzzling world of the beautiful, elegant, ugly, and grotesque. Human beings ability to experience sublime pleasure emanates from a variety of sensory experiences and a person's ability to make discriminatory observations and judgment in taste and sentiment. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Some believe that art is the imitation of nature; in fact, nature is so sublime that it cannot be imitated. However noble it may be, art cannot perform a single one of the miracles of nature. And besides, why imitate nature when it can be perceived by all those endowed with senses? — Kahlil Gibran

What then did those immortals see, the writers who aimed at all which is greatest and scorned the accuracy which lies in every detail? They saw many other things and they also saw this, that Nature determined man to be no low or ignoble animal; but introducing us into life and this entire universe as into some vast assemblage, to be spectators, in a sort, of her entirety, and most ardent competitors, did then implant in our souls an invincible and eternal love of that which is great and, by our own standard, more devine. Therefore it is, that for the speculation and thought which are within the scope of human endeavour not all the universe together is sufficient, our conceptions often pass beyond the bounds which limit it; and if a man were to look upon life all around, and see how in all things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful stand supreme, he will at once know for what ends we have been born. — Longinus

[Coleridge] selected an instance of what was called the sublime, in DARWIN, who imagined the creation of the universe to have taken place in a moment, by the explosion of a mass of matter in the womb, or centre of space. In one and the same instant of time, suns and planets shot into systems in every direction, and filled and spangled the illimitable void! He asserted this to be an intolerable degradation -referring, as it were, all the beauty and harmony of nature to something like the bursting of a barrel of gunpowder! that spit its combustible materials into a pock-freckled creation! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Posterity will one day laugh at the sublime foolishness of the modern materialistic philosophy. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory. — Louis Pasteur

How sublime to look down on the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet! — Thomas Jefferson

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We hence acquire this sublime and interesting idea; that all the calcareous mountains in the world, and all the strata of clay, coal, marl, sand, and iron, which are incumbent on them, are MONUMENTS OF THE PAST FELICITY OF ORGANIZED NATURE! — Erasmus Darwin

Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased. — Gaston Bachelard

The true Way is sublime. It can't be expressed in language. Of what use are scriptures? But someone who sees his own nature finds the Way, even if he can't read a word. — Bodhidharma

During the age Atlantis, there were only several hundred thousand people living on our planet. They lived in a sublime state of harmony with nature. At that time, because of the purity of the earth's aura, it was much easier to meditate. — Frederick Lenz

...With the failure of the imagination to present form the mind discovers that it has the capacity to conceive of the infinite, and thus has the power to transcend everything that sense can measure and thus present. The sublime feeling in this case arises from the play between the finite nature of the senses and the infinite capacity of reason. — Nicholas Gane

I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side, ... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves. — Henry David Thoreau

When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene. — Jane Austen

The Word bestows adoption on us when he grants us that birth and deification which, transcending nature, come by grace from above through the Spirit. The guarding and preservation of this in God depends on the resolve of those thus born: on their sincere acceptance of the grace bestowed on them and, through the practice of the commandments, on their cultivation of the beauty given to them by grace. Moreover, by emptying themselves of the passions they lay hold of the divine to the same degree as that to which, deliberately emptying himself of his own sublime glory, the Word of God truly became man. — Andrew Louth

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

The transformation of nature, a total fusion of science, art and technology in a sublime statement of human dignity and intelligence through the settlements we build for ourselves. — Paulo Mendes Da Rocha

Unlike the rest of you, I cheerfully admit to my own utter selfishness. I am self-made, self-absorbed, self-serving, self-referential, even self-deprecating, in a charming sort of way. In short, I am all the selfs except selfless. Yet every so often I run across a force of nature that shakes my sublime self-centeredness to its very roots. Something that tears through the landscape like a tornado, leaving nothing but ruin and reexamination in its wake. — William Lashner

The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world's childhood men were by nature sublime poets... — Giambattista Vico

The artist labors while he may, But finds at best too brief the day; And, tho' his works outlast the time And nation that they make sublime, He feels and sees that Nature knows Nothing of time in what she does, But has a leisure infinite Wherein to do her work aright. — Henry Abbey

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

A sunrise, a winter squall, birds flying in a perfect V. These were things that were. The truth, visceral and sublime, of the universe, was that it existed whether we witnessed it or not. Majesty and beauty, these were qualities we projected upon it. A storm was just weather. A sunrise was simply a celestial pattern. It's not that he didn't enjoy them. It's that he didn't require anything more from the universe than that it exist, that it behave consistently-- that gravity worked the way it always worked, that lift and drag were constants. — Noah Hawley

We are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. We can never have enough of nature. — Henry David Thoreau

Who has ever wandered through such forests, in a length of many miles, in a boundless expanse, without a path, without a goal, amid their monstrous shadows, their sacred gloom, without being filled with deep reverence for the sublime greatness of Nature above all human agency, without feeling the grandeur of the idea which forms the basis of Vidar's essence? — Snorri Sturluson

One of the most remarkable of these hymns is that addressed to the Unknown God. The poet says: "In the beginning there arose the Golden Child. As soon as he was born he alone was the lord of all that is. He established the earth and this heaven." The hymn consists of ten stanzas, in which the Deity is celebrated as the maker of the snowy mountains, the sea and the distant river, who made fast the awful heaven, He who alone is God above all gods, before whom heaven and earth stand trembling in their mind. Each stanza concludes with the refrain, "Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice?" We have in this hymn a most sublime conception of the Supreme Being, and while there are many Vedic hymns whose tone is pantheistic and seems to imply that the wild forces of nature are Gods who rule the world, this hymn to the Unknown God is as purely monotheistic as a psalm of David, and shows a spirit of religious awe as profound as any we find in the Hebrew Scriptures. — Epiphanius Wilson

Human nature with all its infirmities and deprivation is still capable of great things. It is capable of attaining to degrees of wisdom and goodness, which we have reason to believe, appear as respectable in the estimation of superior intelligences. Education makes a greater difference between man and man, than nature has made between man and brute. The virtues and powers to which men may be trained, by early education and constant discipline, are truly sublime and astonishing. Isaac Newton and John Locke are examples of the deep sagacity which may be acquired by long habits of thinking and study. — John Adams

She now discovered amidst them, the poet's flights of fancy, and the historian's seldom pleasing - ever instructive page. The first may transmit to posterity the records of a sublime genius, which once flashed in strong, but transient rays, through the tenement of clay it was given a moment to inhabit: and though the tenement decayed and the spirit fled, the essence of a mind which darted through the universe to cull each created and creative image to enrich an ever-varying fancy, is thus snatched from oblivion, and retained, spite of nature, amidst the mortality from which it has struggled, and is freed. The page of the historian can monarchs behold, and not offer up the sceptre to be disencumbered of the ponderous load that clogs their elevation! Can they read of armies stretch upon the plain, provinces laid waste, and countries desolated, and wish to be the mortal whose vengeance, or whose less fierce, but fatal decision sent those armies forth! — Mary Charlton

Taste is, in general, considered as that faculty of the human mind by which we perceive and enjoy whatever is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature or art. — Sir Archibald Alison, 2nd Baronet

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

Music, together with certain sorts of majestic landscape, had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches about the nature of the universe. It was all nonsense. Her tears had been no different from the ones people cried at sentimental television commercials. They represented nothing but a momentary and regrettable submission to kitsch. — Zoe Heller

How great are the advantages of solitude! How sublime is the silence of nature's ever-active energies! There is something in the very name of wilderness, which charms the ear, and soothes the spirit of man. There is religion in it. — Estwick Evans

There is something very sublime, though very fanciful, in Plato's description of the Supreme Being,
that truth is His body and light His shadow. According to this definition there is nothing so contradictory to his nature as error and falsehood. — Joseph Addison

The order of things should be reversed; the seventh day should be the day of toil ... and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this widerspread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature ... — Henry David Thoreau

Nature conceals her secrets because she is sublime, not because she is a trickster. — Albert Einstein

Humanity badly needs things that are big and fearsome and homicidally wild. Counterintuitive as it may seem, we need to preserve those few remaining beasts, places, and forces of nature capable of murdering us with sublime indifference. — David Quammen