#sublime

Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time. ↗

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#departing #footprints #great #great men #leave

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

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

Soon I knew the craft of experimental physics was beyond me - it was the sublime quality of patience - patience in accumulating data, patience with recalcitrant equipment - which I sadly lacked. ↗

— Abdus Salam

#craft #data #equipment #experimental #i

...Imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears--would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#means-justifying-the-ends #profound #religion #sublime #imagination

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

#humility #nature #sublime #technology #wonder

Coleridge perceived as no one else had done that lesbianism could be a source of the sublime. ↗

— Andrew Elfenbein

#coleridge #lesbianism #stc #sublime #romantic

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