#sublime

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. ↗

— E. M. Forster

#ear #ever #fifth #into #man

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly. ↗

— Alexander Pope

#folly #genius #good #good sense #only

People do not always understand the motives of sublime conduct, and when they are astonished they are very apt to think they ought to be alarmed. The truth is none are fit judges of greatness but those who are capable of it. ↗

— Jane Porter

#always #apt #astonished #capable #conduct

Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque? ↗

— Pierre Schaeffer

#baroque #called #civilization #most #music

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

#focus #sublime #beauty

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

— Terry Pratchett

#life #sublime #humor

Happiness is the sublime moment when you get out of your corsets at night. ↗

— Joyce Grenfell

#get #happiness #moment #night #out

Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty: permit the distinctive sign of our order to be that it does not possess anything of its own beneath the sun, for the glory of your name, and that it have no other patrimony than begging. ↗

— Francis of Assisi

#begging #beneath #distinctive #does #glory

A few of the sublimest geniuses of Rome and Athens had some faint discoveries of the spiritual nature of the human soul, and formed some probable conjectures, that man was designed for a future state of existence. ↗

— David Brainerd

#conjectures #designed #discoveries #existence #faint

Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#contrast #even #everything #little #need