"Sublime" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Both of the Old and of the New! The school of Hermes Trismegistus, Who uttered his oracles sublime Before the Olympiads, in the dew Of the early dawn and dusk of Time, The reign of dateless old Hephaestus! As northward, from its Nubian springs, The Nile, forever new and old, Among the living and the dead, ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... force, depth and impetuosity. Real poetry, able to convey dream and illusion, cannot be brought forth. Lyric poetry proves abortive, and likewise the epic poem.[3227] Nothing sprouts on these distant fields, remote and sublime, where speech unites with music and painting. Never do we hear the involuntary scream of intense torment, the lonely confession of a distraught soul,[3228] pouring out his heart to relieve himself. When a creation of characters is imperative, as in dramatic ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... girls her own age; in fact, she had a vague idea that such subjects were not to be discussed out of church, or, at least, without a clergyman to direct the conversation. And Phyllis's childish figure, glowing face, and sublime confidence affected her with a sense of something strange and remote. Yet the conversation interested her greatly. People are very foolish who restrain spiritual confidences; no topic is so universally and permanently interesting as religious experience. Elizabeth felt its charm ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... These sublime words of faith were on his lips as he closed his eyes, when sleep came to him, and dreams with sleep—busy, swift-winged dreams, proving that though the body may rest, the soul must ever be awake. First he seemed to hear the melodies of songs ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... been allowed to fall into most undeserved obscurity. This was not the fault of his scholars, who, in spite of the Papal condemnation of his writings, speak of Eckhart with the utmost reverence, as the "great," "sublime," ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... the struggle to do something great and wonderful, we miss the little successes, the sum of which would make our lives sublime; and often, after all this straining and struggling for the larger, for the grander things, we miss them, and then we discover to our horror what we have missed on the way up—what sweetness, what beauty, what loveliness, what a lot of common, homely, cheering ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... "the supreme, invisible god," a prayer offered up in time of pestilence, we have the most remarkable references to the destruction of the people by stones and fire. It would almost seem as if this great prayer, noble and sublime in its language, was first poured out in the very midst of the Age of Fire, wrung from the human heart by the most appalling calamity that ever overtook the race; and that it was transmitted from age ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... passed while they were making their way from an upper room of the Embassy to the street. There they jumped into an araba with a kavass on the box, dashed down Pera Street, past the banking quarter, over the Galata bridge, up the Sublime Porte Road and into the Bayazid Square, where they reached their destination. A crowd of servants was grouped about the Grand Entrance, and as Johnson and his friend Callard came up, the Turks flocked around them officiously, assuring them with one voice ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... hand, the lofty bards who strung their bolder harps to higher measures, and sung the Wrath of Peleus' Son, and Man's first Disobedience, have never been censured for want of sweetness and refinement. The sublime, the nervous, and the masculine, characterise their compositions; as the beautiful, the soft, and the delicate, mark those of the others. Grandeur, dignity, and force, distinguish the one species; ease, simplicity, and purity, the other. Both shine ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... and possessing with this velocity, masses a thousand times smaller than the smallest atom known to science. Furthermore, they are charged with negative electricity; they pass straight through bodies considered opaque with a sublime indifference to the properties of the body, with the exception of its mere density; they cause bodies which they strike to shine out in the dark; they affect a photographic plate; they render the air a conductor ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... said he, 'this is a sublime moment! To see you, the gay companion, the good fellow, the butterfly, I may say, of other days, a member of this great body is certainly soul-stirring! So you have realized your ambition? What next? The Senate? And then—then?' he ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... enchanted, wander evermore. Of all the genius-gifted thou hast reigned King of our hearts; and, till upon the shore Of the Eternal dies the voice of Time, Thy name shall mightiest stand—pure, brilliant, and sublime. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... deeds. What would have become of the names of Rustam, Cyrus, and Afraciab, if eloquence had not preserved their memory like the recital of a remote dream? It is by the pearls of elocution that the sweet relations between distant friends are preserved. The study of this sublime art is like a market always filled with buyers. It will remain in the world as long as the ear shall be sensible to harmony, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... but find cheating at cards base and unthinkable. Conscience in the abstract may be a divine entity, but in the realities of everyday life it is a medley of motives, purposes and teachings, varying from the grotesque and mischief-working to the sublime and splendid. ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... and crystalline. His face, form and features are to us familiar—his goggle eyes, bald head, snub nose and bow-legs! The habit of his life—his goings and comings, his arguments and wrangles, his infinite leisure, his sublime patience, his perfect faith—all these things are plain, lifting the man out of the commonplace and setting ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... friend, if I utter things aerial and sublime; for I am recounting the wonders of my ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... hair falling about her shoulders as she peered far out across the sea—the black, storm-tossed sea—and far out among the billows the tiny speck of sail that never reached the shore. Beth was no connoisseur of art, but she knew the picture before her was intensely beautiful, even sublime. There was something in it that made her feel. It moved her to tears even as Arthur's music had done. No need to tell her both came from the same hand. Besides, no one else had seen that poem but Arthur. And Arthur could paint like this, ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... their raptures o'er some specious rhime Dub'd by the musk'd and greasy mob sublime. 96 For spleen's dear sake hear how a coxcomb prates As clam'rous o'er his joys as fifty cats; "Music has charms to sooth a savage breast, To soften rocks, and oaks"—and all the rest: 100 "I've heard"—Bless these long ears!—"Heav'ns what a strain! Good God! What thunders burst in ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... Keats's depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me to do justice to his own genius, which, malgre all the fantastic fopperies of his style, was undoubtedly of great promise. His fragment of 'Hyperion' seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as AEschylus. He is a loss to our literature; and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said to have been persuaded that he had not taken the right line, and was reforming his style upon the more classical ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... by the Secretary of State to Mr. Marsh, the American minister at Constantinople, instructing him to ask of the Turkish Government permission for the Hungarians then imprisoned within the dominions of the Sublime Porte to remove to this country. On the 3d of March last both Houses of Congress passed a resolution requesting the President to authorize the employment of a public vessel to convey to this country Louis Kossuth and his associates in captivity. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Millard Fillmore • Millard Fillmore
... She would be his light and his wisdom; she would be his greatness and his strength; yet hidden from the eyes of all men she would be, above all, his only and lasting weakness. A very woman! In the sublime vanity of her kind she was thinking already of moulding a god from the clay at her feet. A god for others to worship. She was content to see him as he was now, and to feel him quiver at the slightest touch of her light fingers. And ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... fear-feeling is unnecessary and hurtful. If you can remember that the White Life or Universe and you have the same desire, your highest welfare, you can banish the fear-element, reserving only the reason-assurance element. All the fears in the world cannot benefit you. Harmony and courage will sublime ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... utensils, as well as provisions, and a half-hour later they were beginning a supplementary breakfast of bacon and coffee. And if anything in all the wide world, from the time of Noah to that of the Adventure Club, ever tasted sublime to a shipwrecked mariner it was that same bacon ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... in rendering the words of the angel thus, "Why askest thou after my name, seeing it is WONDERFUL?" and for an explanation of the epithet, they refer to the sublime description of Isaiah, "His name shall be called WONDERFUL, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace." If this be correct, the ministering spirit, concealing his glory in the form of a man, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... it was sublime, and with every movement and every gesture there was a something hidden, a suggestion of a personality and mysterious charm that we have always heretofore considered the exclusive property of just one woman in the ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... attained is marvellous. Complete success was, of course, impossible. But, in the terrific rout, Ponderevo never touches a problem save to grip it firmly. He leaves nothing alone, and everything is handled—handled! His fine detachment, and his sublime common sense, never desert him in the hour when he judges. Naturally his chief weapon in the collision is just common sense; it is at the impact of mere common sense that the current system crumbles. ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... The strained look had passed from his young face. It seemed to him like a jump from the sublime to the ridiculous. ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... to add another voice to the chorus of admiration which sings "Gloria" to the author of the double poem of "Tannhauser." If others have more right than I to speak to you of the sublime artistic expression which you have given to such deep emotions, I yet venture to tell you how souls lost in the crowd who chant to themselves your "Sangerkrieg" are penetrated by your harmonies, which ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... handled, always drew a laugh from the tolerant hearers. This is all very well in farce, but such anti-climax becomes painful when the speaker falls from the sublime to the ridiculous quite unintentionally. The pause, to be effective in some other manner than in that of the boomerang, must precede or follow a thought that is really worth while, or at least an idea whose bearing upon the rest of ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... It has neither been leveled up nor leveled down, to an average mediocrity. Beneath the dingy uniformity of international fashions in dress, man remains what he has always been—a splendid fighting animal, a self-sacrificing hero, and a bloodthirsty savage. Human nature is at once sublime and horrible, holy and satanic. Apart from the accumulation of knowledge and experience, which are external and precarious acquisitions, there is no proof that we have changed much since ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Milton's piety and lofty principle and massive learning must have come to him from the Stowmarket Vicar. In our day there is little chance of a young scholar becoming imbued with Miltonian ideas on the subject of civil and religious liberty. That sublime genius which was to sing in immortal ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... improvement, exclaimed that it was the business of the Central Government as representative of the sovereign people to find solutions; and so long as they maintained themselves in office they went their respective ways with a sublime contempt for the ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... and truth, neither adding to nor subtracting from its model. Genius seizes upon the hints that nature gives, and without being false to her, makes use only of that which helps to make up the beautiful, the sublime, or the terrible; showing the power that is within nature rather than nature herself. Talent sees life as it is, and so describes it, if it ventures into the domain of literature. Genius sees life as it is capable of being, and hence comes ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... compares his rural elegies with the lovely pictures of the first of all the Syracusan poets. Horatius Flaccus had more of the quality of Theocritus than of Virgil; and though Virgil might have been a good guide for Dante in his sublime wanderings, he was a guide of the intellect rather than of the heart. It requires some courage, perhaps, to confess that one reads Theocritus in English rather than in Greek. The French rendering is too paraphrastic; but, although my classical ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... and to form with him one person only. Childe Harold's sorrows are those of Lord Byron, but there no longer exists any trace of misanthropy or of satiety. His heart already beats with that of the poet for chaste and devoted affections, for all the most amiable, the most noble, and the most sublime of sentiments. He loves the flowers, the smiling and glorious, the charming and ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... exclusive property. But realities have a way of differing from forms, and just as in political affairs it is common to regard the State as a very different thing to the people who compose it, as a sublime entity with a separate existence of its own, so directors are apt to distinguish between the company and the shareholders. It is the company to which they owe allegiance. To pay away in dividends to shareholders money which they ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... the prison at Constance are the expressions of a pure and elevated mind, and present the best evidence of his spotless Christian character. Some of them might serve as beautiful specimens of the sublime.] ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... religious worship, but are not intended to destroy it. The Vedantists hold that while in truth there is but one God, the various forms of worship in the Vedas, of Indra, Agni, the Maruts, etc., were all intended for those who could not rise to this sublime monotheism. Those who believe in the Sankhya maintain that though it wholly omits God, and is called "the system without a God," it merely omits, but does not deny, the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... years were chiefly spent in reading history and studying philosophy, more especially the then reigning philosophy of Kant. Numerous essays on philosophy, chiefly on the Good, the Beautiful, and the Sublime, were published during this interval. But what is more important, Schiller's mind was enlarged, enriched, and invigorated; his poetical genius, by lying fallow for a time, gave promise of a richer harvest to come; his position in the world ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium; the bitter lapse into everyday life, the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... day, but also Campus and Vega, which, by reason of the precession of the Equinoxes, are to be our polar stars 12,000 years hence. His imagination, as if intoxicated, reeled wildly through these sublime infinitudes and got lost in them. He forgot all about himself and all about his companions. He forgot even the strangeness of the fate that had sent them wandering through these forbidden regions, like a bewildered comet that had ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... music rises; the cataract seems to seize its own rhythm and sing it over again, so that the ear and soul are roused by a double vibration. This is some effect of the wind, causing echoes to the thundering anthem. It is very sublime, giving the effect of a spiritual repetition through ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... benefit of his teaching. About the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality, combined with profundity of insight, ... which must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in his inspiration, in the very first rank of the men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer and martyr to that mission who ever existed upon earth, religion ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... blank verse of Pitt; and yet the latter, like Milton, stalked with a conscious dignity of pre-eminence, and fascinated his audience with that respect which always attends the pompous but often hollow idea of the sublime." Burke, too, in one of his speeches on American affairs, utters a still warmer panegyric on his character and abilities, while lamenting his policy and its fruits: "I speak of Charles Townshend, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... tragicum quam verborum sonitus inanis, nulla subjecta sententia neque scientia." What can be so proper for tragedy as a set of big sounding words, so contrived together as to convey no meaning? which I shall one day or other prove to be the sublime of Longinus. Ovid declareth absolutely for the ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... between 1680 and 1786. Like a veteran devotee Great Britain began atoning for the coquetries of her hot youth. While Spain and Portugal have passed sensible laws for gradual emancipation, England, with a sublime folly, set free by a stroke of the pen, at the expense of twenty millions sterling the born and bred slaves of Jamaica. The result was an orgy for a week, a systematic refusal to work, and for many years the ruin of the ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... charms of a noble and highly-cultivated mind with the fascinations of female delicacy and loveliness. To understand the secret of the almost miraculous influence she exerted, it is necessary to trace her career, with some degree of minuteness, from the cradle to the hour of her sublime ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... warbler's, he said, "The Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters." This was his text, and,—"I suppose it is commonly conceded," said he, "that the book of Genesis is the most ancient, if not most sublime of all the writings that enrich the world. The learned have cited the first verses of this book as specimens of sublimity unequalled by any language. And though the prophets, and the gospel authors outsoar Moses, I think, in the morally sublime; yet ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... and greater influence on the American short story as the translations of his work increase, and these five volumes prove him to be fully equal to Dostoievsky in sustained and varied spiritual observation. These stories range through the entire gamut of human emotion from sublime tragedy to the richest and most golden comedy. If I were to choose a single author of short stories for my library on a desert island, my choice would inevitably ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... is sublime, and yet His manly shyness is absurd; Of all the girls he ever met It was myself he most preferred; He'd try and try, but couldn't get His wretched ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... this continent and of those islands and the organization upon their soil of societies and governments have been great and important events. After all, they are merely preliminaries, a preparation by secondary incidents, in comparison with the sublime result which is about to be consummated—the junction of the two civilizations upon the coast and in the islands of the Pacific. There certainly never happened upon this earth any purely human event which is comparable to ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... offer up myself on the altar of my country to mosquitoes, and never again will I murmur at their depredations and voracity." Talk of pilgrimages, and the ordinary vow of wearing only the Virgin's colors (the most becoming in the world); there never was one of greater heroism or more sublime self-sacrifice than this. And as if to prove my sincerity, they have been worse than ever these last two nights. But as yet I have not murmured; for the Yankees, who swore to enter Port Hudson before last Monday night, have not yet fulfilled their promise, and we hold ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... to dinner, with the exquisite pathos of the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. Devotedly as she worshipped the Master, whose picture hung above her Steinway Grand, she could never bring herself to believe that the two succeeding movements were on the same sublime level as the first, and besides they "went" very much faster. But she had seriously thought, as she came down in the train today and planned her fresh activities at home of trying to master them, so that she could get through their intricacies with tolerable accuracy. Until then, she would ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... description of those places in India that are embellished by running waters and a vigorous vegetation, my imagination retraces a sea of foam and palm-trees, the tops of which rise above a stratum of vapour. The majestic scenes of nature, like the sublime works of poetry and the arts, leave remembrances that are incessantly awakening, and which, through the whole of life, mingle with all our feelings of what is ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... captured Gorizia, a feat unparalleled by any thus far accomplished by the English and French on the West. The defense of Verdun remains, of course, the supreme and sublime achievement of defensive action, but the taking of Gorizia is thus far the most splendid work of ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... and faith that was sublime, he of the petticoats went at it, and had just succeeded in turning a side somersault, such as was never seen before, when further effort was nipped in the bud by some ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... the tourist sits upon the solitary summit, he forgets the present in memory of the past. Neither the pyramids of Egypt nor the Coliseum of the Eternal City are draped with a more sublime antiquity. Here, during generations which no man can number, the sons of the forest gathered around their council-fires, and struggled, as human hearts, whether savage or civilized, must ever ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... of the immortal, And patience is sublime, And trouble a thing of every day, And touching every time; And childhood sweet and sunny, And womanly truth and grace, Ever call light life's darkness And bless earth's lowliest place. ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... de Cadiz," and other works had been produced at the Opera Comique in Paris. He was now director of the French opera in New Orleans and had brought out the charming Mademoiselle Capriccioso and the sublime Signor Staccato. The lady by his side, a dark brunette with features that were still beautiful, was the nimble-footed Madame Feu-de-joie, whose shapely limbs and graceful motions had delighted two generations and were like to appeal to a third. Men who at twenty had thrown Feu-de-joie posies, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... of yours won a classic event of the turf. How much finer it would be if you had some boys in training for the sublime contests of life, an' it wouldn't cost half so much. You know, there are plenty of homeless boys who need your help. Wouldn't it pay better to develop a Henry M. Stanley—once a homeless orphan—than a Salvator or an Ormonde or ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... woman is the flower of Nature. But, like the rose, it bears within it the seed from which some still more beautiful flower may result. No pair, however sublime their union, suppose that it is the best that could by any possibility at any time exist. An absolutely perfect union depends upon an absolutely perfect pair in absolutely perfect surroundings. And no one supposes ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... interviews with their chief, both before and after, smiled with the whispered conviction that the fresh and ingenuous young stranger had been "chucked" like others until they met his kindly, tolerant, and even superior eyes, and were puzzled. Meanwhile Barker, who had that sublime, natural quality of abstraction over small impertinences which is more exasperating than studied indifference, after his brief hesitation passed out unconcernedly through the swinging mahogany doors into the blowy street. Here the wind and rain revived him; the bank and its curt refusal were ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... Ideas and of Syllogisms W. S. Lander's Poetry Beauty Chronological Arrangement of Works Toleration Norwegians Articles of Faith Modern Quakerism Devotional Spirit Sectarianism Origen Some Men like Musical Glasses Sublime and Nonsense Atheist Proof of Existence of God Kant's attempt Plurality of Worlds A Reasoner Shakspeare's Intellectual Action Crabbe and Southey Peter Simple and Tom Cringle's Log Chaucer Shakspeare Ben Jonson ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... fast to earth, and its most perfect works have still one foot of clay. Genius claims kindred with the very workings of Nature herself, so that a sunset shall seem like a quotation from Dante, and if Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his verses shall but seem nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean. Talent may make friends for itself, but only genius can give to its creations the divine power of winning love and veneration. Enthusiasm cannot cling to what itself is unenthusiastic, nor will he ever have disciples who has not ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to the listening waste. At last from Aries rolls the bounteous sun, And the bright Bull receives him. Then no more Th' expansive atmosphere is cramped with cold, But, full of life and vivifying soul, Lifts the light clouds sublime and spreads them thin, Fleecy and ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... a devoted worshipper of "The Great Influence," or God, and it is delightful to think that we shall associate with such great minds in our eternal abode in that Broader Life where the pure of all spheres gather. Will I do wrong if I quote that sublime beatitude, making it applicable to all worlds? "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... antidote for emptiness. It would prepare me far better for to-morrow work than pondering Johnny's defections, or his grades, whether high or low, or marking silly papers with marks that are still sillier. I like Walt Whitman because he was such a sublime loafer. His loafing gave him time to grow big inside, and so, he had big elemental thoughts that were good for him and good for me when I think them ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... Since the most sublime things are often those which are the least understood, there were people in the town who said, when commenting on this conduct of the Bishop, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... to his pleasures at Bruxelles, in which capital many young fellows of our army declared they found infinitely greater diversion even than in London: and Mr. Henry Esmond remained in his sick-room, where he writ a fine comedy, that his mistress pronounced to be sublime, and that was acted no less than three successive nights in London in ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... are, Mere women, personal and passionate, You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives, Sublime Madonnas and enduring saints! We get no Christ from you,—and verily We shall not get a ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... miles on endless miles of grassy level prairies, among cruel canyons, in dreary sand lands where men die of thirst, monotonous and maddening in their barren, eternal sameness; and sometimes, between sunrises of superb grandeur, and sunsets of sublime glory, over a land of exquisite virgin loveliness—it is small wonder that the ruddy cheeks were bronze as an Indian's, that the roundness of boyhood had given place to the muscular strength of manhood, that the gray eyes should hold something ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... powerful! So perish the enemies of your sublime highness. Were they not the sons of Shitan?" ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... attempts to bring out, by objective dramatic touches, either the grievousness of the bereavement or the grief of the mourner, such attempts as are made to do this are either commonplace or "one step in advance" of the sublime. Take this, for instance: "The mourner was sitting upon a stone bench at the door, with his ass's pannel and its bridle on one side, which he took up from time to time, then laid them down, looked at them, and shook his head. He then took the crust of bread out of his wallet ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... "strong" community martially trained, like a super-state, to oppose everything not included within it, and to become omnipotent in the art of utilising the non-human forces of nature.... The will to return to God may prove to have been, in the history of the phenomenal world, a sublime accident." ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... rudenesses, the lingering shadows of dark days, the unwounded pride once and the wounded pride now, the unconquerable will, a soaring spirit whose wings were meant for the upper air but which are broken and beat the dust. All these are sublime things to paint in any human countenance; they are the footprints of destiny on our faces. The greatest masters of the brush that the world has ever known could not have asked for anything greater. When you behold her, perhaps some of you may think of certain brief but eternal words of Pascal: ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... dawned upon a nation already glorious with the sublime promise of a prophetic infancy. The strong serpents of Tyranny and Superstition had been crushed in its powerful grasp. The songs of two oceans—the lullaby of its earlier days—had cheered it on to a youth whose dignity and beauty were bought with sword and rifle, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... after, and then again insultingly asked, whether he were still in the same mind as to the disposal of his daughters, his answer was, "I cannot but grieve at the cruelty of your deeds, but am not sorry for the freedom of my own words." Such expressions as these may belong perhaps to a more sublime and accomplished virtue. ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... weakness, had an iron tenacity of purpose beneath, which may well stand for our example. Like some pure glacier from an Alpine peak, it comes silently, slowly down into the valley; and though to the eye it seems not to move, it presses on with a force sublime in its silence and gigantic in its gentleness, and buries beneath it the rocks that stand in its way. The patience of Christ is the very sublimity of persistence in well-doing. It is our example, and more than our example—it is His ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Fairy returned, and the twins, their eyes bright with the unholy light of mischief, never looked at her. They sometimes looked heavenward with a sublime contentment that drove Connie nearly frantic. Occasionally they uttered cryptic words about the morrow,—and the older members of the family smiled pleasantly, but Connie shuddered. She remembered so many April ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... this the buckler of his education disintegrated. The idea of Ruth as a talisman against misfortune—which he now recognized as a sick man's idea—faded as his appreciation of the absurd reasserted itself. But in its stead—toward morning—there appeared another idea which appealed to him as sublime, appealed to the primitive conscience, to his artistic sense of the drama, to the poet and the novelist in him. He was and always would be dramatizing his emotions; perpetually he would be confounding his actual with ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... the great thing," insisted the other. "You didn't look as if you were frightened. From all one could see, your nerve was sublime. And nothing else matters—it ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... mourners, weep anew! Not all to that bright station dared to climb: And happier they their happiness who knew, Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time In which suns perished. Others more sublime, 5 Struck by the envious wrath of man or God, Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime; And some yet live, treading the thorny road Which leads, through toil and hate, ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... Buddhist places of worship, containing as it does not only the eight sacred hairs of Gautama, but also relics of the three Buddhas who preceded him. It is also from its great height, 370 feet (higher than St Paul's Cathedral), and graceful shape, extremely imposing and sublime. ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... to Jeremiah." "There are but few to whom I need say" continues Mr. Everett, "that the words of Grotius in his commentary are, "These marks have their first fulfillment in Jeremiah, but a more especial, sublime, and often indeed more literal fulfillment in Christ." Mr. Everett's work p. 148. I do not see how this passage of Grotius contradicts my representation of his opinion. The passage from Grotius quoted by Mr. Everett declares, "that these marks [i. e. the 53d. of Isaiah] have their first fulfillment ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... the Unpropitious Messengers," a picture of great power and truly sublime in the simplicity of its dramatic expression, the vision falls without hesitation on the figure of Pharaoh, easily passing over the three prostrate forms in the immediate foreground. These might have diverted the attention and weakened the subject had not they been skillfully played for second ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... in order to administer to a deeply distressed lady such comforts as an afflicted mind can gather from the sublime ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... that took form in steel and stone and glass, yet none matched the lightness, the grace, the intricacy, the sublime simplicity of these interwoven crystalline structures where light from the noonday sun separated prismatically until it filled the air with myriads of living, darting, colored sparks of fire above him. Where the breeze that blew through the vibrating spires ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... joint heirs with the Lord Jesus Christ, inheriting all that Christ inherited from His Father. Ye shall have the same spirit that was in Christ. Metaphor and trope and figure are exhausted in the endeavor of the apostle to set forth this sublime truth. Christ is the servant of God. We are the servants of God. He is the Son of God. We are the sons of God. He is the light of the world. We are the lights of the world. He is a priest forever. We are priests perpetually serving in His temple. He is ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... constitution, after which "God, who cooled the heat of a Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, or shut the mouths of lions for the honor of a Daniel, will raise your mind above the narrow notion that the general government has no power, to the sublime idea that Congress, with the President as executor, is as almighty in its sphere as Jehovah is ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... an air of dignity that Drake regarded as sublime and Tolly thought ludicrous, but the latter was too fond of his red friend to allow his ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... or justice, but having been created only to support a wicked rebellion, will of course be expunged by the reestablishment of the Union. Indeed, by a new mathematical and philosophical principle, far transcending the most sublime discoveries of Newton, Leibnitz, or La Place, the rebel debt is redeemable six months after the end of eternity, namely, six months after it is an independent nation, they shall have ratified a treaty of peace ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hierarchy imitates the heavenly in some degree, but not by a perfect likeness. For in the heavenly hierarchy the perfection of the order is in proportion to its nearness to God; so that those who are the nearer to God are the more sublime in grade, and more clear in knowledge; and on that account the superiors are never enlightened by the inferiors, whereas in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, sometimes those who are the nearer to God in sanctity, are in the lowest grade, and are not conspicuous for science; and some also are ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... not destitute of merit and design. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germe in their minds, which only wants cultivation. They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory, such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated; but never yet could I find a black, that had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration[Footnote: "Sleep hab no massa," ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... sublime / And undismayed, No touch of Time / Upon thee laid. That that is thine; / Ended the quest! I seek my shrine ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... Lee beat up the eggs and found, after a bad moment, some salt in a box, and then poured her omelet into the pan. She was very anxious that it be a good omelet. She must make good her claim as a cook or Henri's sublime faith in ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... recalled our visit to the Great Cathedral of Cologne, the most complete piece of Gothic architecture anywhere to be found. We mounted the steps of one of the gigantic towers which lift their sublime heads to a height of five hundred two feet, the exact length of the cathedral. Here we gazed out over the level plain that stretched away to the marvelous scenic region of the Seven Mountains. The foundation of this beautiful structure was laid two hundred fifty years before the discovery ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... Procession to the Convent in the distance, with the young King, Edward VI. beneath a canopy, has a picturesque, if not imposing effect. By the way, a Correspondent, who appears to delight in the quaint sublime, tells us that in digging the foundation of the Market just erected in Covent Garden, a quantity of human bones were dug from a rich black mould, at the depth of five feet from the surface, opposite James-street. "The Irish labourers ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... forbidden. Manslaughter, which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man's laughter, which is the end of the other. A pun is prima facie an insult to the person you are talking with. It implies utter indifference to or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how serious. I speak of total depravity, and one says all that is written on the subject is deep raving. I have committed my self-respect by talking with such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... be led according to the content of the ideas suggested to it, as well to sublime and noble deeds as, on the other hand, to expressions of the lower and barbaric instincts. That is the art of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Swedish literature is sublime and magnificent, like its history and its scenery; it is simple and glad, as well as sad, like the lives of its people. One of the great days in Sweden, or at least in Stockholm, is the celebration, on the 26th of July, of the anniversary of the birth, ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... vitiated with any defect or privation of liberal and exalted sciences. Far from it, all must judge that in you are lodged a cornucopia and encyclopaedia, an unmeasurable profundity of knowledge in the most peregrine and sublime disciplines, so frequently the admiration, and so rarely the concomitants of the imperite vulgar. This gently compels me, who in preceding times indefatigably kept my private affections absolutely subjugated, to condescend ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... that the teachings of the Stoics (and perhaps also of some famous philosophers of our time), confining themselves to this alleged necessity, can only impart a forced patience; whereas our Lord inspires thoughts more sublime, and even instructs us in the means of gaining contentment by assuring us that since God, being altogether good and [55] wise, has care for everything, even so far as not to neglect one hair of our ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... brought By friends, made sharper by their pity and grief, The charge that he refused his martyrdom And so denied his own high faith. Whose faith,— His friends', his Protestant followers', or his own? Faced by the torture, that sublime old man Was still a faithful Catholic, and his thought Plunged deeper than his Protestant followers knew. His aim was not to strike a blow at Rome But to confound his enemies. He believed As humbly as Castelli or Celeste ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... time the Beaconsfield Cabinet had been treating secretly with the Sublime Porte. When Lord Salisbury found out that Russia would not abate her demands for Batoum, Ardahan, and Kars, he sought to safeguard British interests in the Levant by acquiring complete control over the island of Cyprus. His final instructions to Mr. Layard to that ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... nothing but these salient characteristics, but at the first word she was struck by the sweetness of the speaker's voice. Looking at him more closely, she saw that the eyes under the grizzled eyebrows had shed tears, and his face, turned in profile, wore so sublime an impress of sorrow, that the Marquise recognized the ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... particularly conversational, and was apt to repeat the same things over and over again, with a sublime unconsciousness of being prosy; but he liked to hear Mary talk, and he listened with seeming intelligence. He questioned her about the world outside his cloistered life—the wars and rumours of wars—and, although the names of the questions and the men of the day seemed utterly strange to him, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... quality, the actual originality of the form is a little difficult to describe. But its general characteristic is the fearless and most dexterous use of grotesque things in order to express sublime emotions. The best and most characteristic of the poems are love-poems; they express almost to perfection the real wonderland of youth, but they do not express it by the ideal imagery of most poets of love. The imagery of these poems consists, if we may take a rapid ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... respectfully bow the head before their faded features. Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was neither wife nor maid; she was and ever will be a living poem. Mademoiselle Salomon de Villenoix belonged to the race of these heroic beings. Her devotion was religiously sublime, inasmuch as it won her no glory after being, for years, a daily agony. Beautiful and young, she loved and was beloved; her lover lost his reason. For five years she gave herself, with love's devotion, to the mere mechanical ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... if, though still on earth, she had partially anticipated heaven; but heaven, even on earth was not to be yet, for the measure of her merits, and, therefore, of her sufferings, was not filled up. As we have already more than once remarked, the Almighty had called her to a sublime degree of purity of soul; to the end of life, therefore, He would furnish her with opportunities of advancing in the virtue which here below can never attain its last perfection, some alloy of the love of self mingling to the end with the love of God, even in the ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... of his figures. Form with him was what it is with us,—a medium by which to communicate ideas, sensations, feelings; in short, the infinite poesy of being. Every figure is a world; a portrait, whose original stands forth like a sublime vision, colored with the rainbow tints of light, drawn by the monitions of an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which points to the past of its whole existence as the source of its given expression. ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... Hammersmith, Madam, a place That you probably seldom illume with the light of your beautiful face. But what? That's a far larger question, full answer to which would take time. Far better go see for yourself. If there's aught of the moral sublime In these gold-grubbing days, 'tis in scenes where love-service unbought and unpaid— A vastly unbusiness-like thing in the eyes of the vassals of Trade!— Is devoted in silence unseen to the outcast, the old, and the poor. Five hundred such waifs are here ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 5, 1892 • Various
... and women who had learned at last that power comes from above, and their title to rule came not from their subjects but from the Supreme Ruler of all—shepherds without sheep, captains without soldiers to command. It was piteous—horribly piteous, yet inspiring. The act of faith was so sublime; and Percy's heart quickened as he understood it. These, then, men and women like himself, were not ashamed to appeal from man to God, to assume insignia which the world regarded as playthings, but which to them were emblems of supernatural commission. Was there ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... but one must always have a care for divine decorum. There are certain words the use of which debases this sublime quality, and it is meet that these should be left to men, because they ...
— Amphitryon • Moliere
... to him the Review of Mr. Burke's 'Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful;' and Sir John Hawkins, with equal discernment, has inserted it in his collection of Johnson's works: whereas it has no resemblance to Johnson's composition, and is well known to have been written by Mr. Murphy, who has acknowledged it to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill |
