#sublime

If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal. ↗

— Denis Diderot

#deny #essential #great #kind #petty

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

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

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

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting. ↗

— Mason Cooley

#interesting #novel #out #seeks #sublime

What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime - terror. ↗

— Anish Kapoor

#carry #darkness #interests #me #principal

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

Physical vision - one might say scientific vision - brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite. ↗

— Richard Holmes

#inspirational #observation #reading #science #sublime

Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child - there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance - I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little child - Some think me middling, others silly, other foolish - every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will; when in thruth it is with my will - I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so graet a resource. This is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room, and eclipese from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good Poet - I hope I am not here playing tricks 'to make the angels weep': I think not: for I have not the least contempt for my species; and though it may sound paradoxical: my greatest elevations of Soul leave me every time more humbled - Enough of this - though in your Love for me you will not think it enough. ↗

— John Keats

#keats #poet #romanticism #solitude #sublime