#sphere

From the vast, invisible ocean of moonlight overhead fell, here and here, a slender, broken stream that seemed to plash against the intercepting branches and trickle to earth, forming small white pools among the clumps of laurel. But these leaks were few and served only to accentuate the blackness of his environment, which his imagination found it easy to people with all manner of unfamiliar shapes, menacing, uncanny, or merely grotesque. He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is - how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers, whispers that startle - ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes, or in their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves - it may be the leap of a wood rat, it may be the footstep of a panther. What caused the breaking of that twig? What the low, alarmed twittering in that bushful of birds? There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live! ("A Tough Tussle") ↗

— Ambrose Bierce

#dark #darkness #forest #moon #moonlight

Now, we occupy a lowly position, both in space and rank in comparison with the heavenly sphere, and the Almighty is Most High not in space, but with respect to absolute existence, greatness and power. ↗

— Maimonides

#almighty #both #comparison #existence #greatness

Leaders in all spheres who are living with HIV should be encouraged, not coerced, to lead by example and disclose their HIV status. ↗

— Nelson Mandela

#disclose #encouraged #example #hiv #lead

Consciousness of myself, combined with complete ignorance of everything that does not fall within my sphere of thinking, is the most telling proof of my substantiality outside God, of my original existence. ↗

— Moses Mendelssohn

#complete #consciousness #does #everything #existence

It is high time to compel man by the might of right to give woman her political, legal and social rights. She will find her own sphere in accordance with her capacities, powers and tastes; and yet she will be woman still. ↗

— Ernestine Rose

#capacities #compel #find #give #her

Nothing ever gets settled in this town. a seething debating society in which the debate never stops, in which people never give up, including me. And so that's the atmosphere in which you administer. ↗

— George P. Shultz

#atmosphere #debate #debating #ever #gets

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life. ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#changes #child #fiction #grown #grown man

Preemption is the right of any nation in order to preserve its National Security; however, preemptive war is a tactic, not a strategy. When used as a strategy preemption dilutes diplomacy, creates an atmosphere of distrust, and promotes regional instability. ↗

— Ellen Tauscher

#atmosphere #creates #diplomacy #distrust #however

The atmosphere is much too near for dreams. It forces us to action. It is close to us. We are in it and of it. It rouses us both to study and to do. We must know its moods and also its motive forces. ↗

— Cleveland Abbe

#also #atmosphere #both #close #dreams

Leave women to find their sphere. ↗

— Lucy Stone

#leave #sphere #their #women