"Sublime" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... my child," replied Father Mathias; "but the Almighty is not only to be worshipped in his works, but in the closet, with meditation, self-examination and faith. Hast thou followed up the precepts which thou hast been taught?—hast thou reverenced the sublime mysteries which have ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... each of these elements, and every other, is built up out of one invariable unit, the electron, and we must therefore assert that Mind is potential in the unit of Matter—the electron itself... It is to assert the sublime truth first perceived by Spinoza, that Mind and Matter are the warp and woof of what Goethe called 'the living garment of God.' Both are complementary expressions of the Unknowable Reality which ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... good man, the Saint is sublime!" he cried. "There is a subtlety of imagination about those two figures, the Saint Mary and the Shipman, that can not be found among Italian masters; I do not know a single one of them capable ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... shamelessness. Drunkenness, filthy conversation, debauchery of the vilest kind, and impiety, were her diversions, varied, as has been seen, by occasional religious fits. Her indecency in everything, language, acts, behaviour, passed all bounds; and yet her pride was so sublime that she could not endure that people should dare to speak of her amid her depravity, so universal and so public; she had the hardihood to declare that nobody had the right to speak of persons of her rank, or blame their ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... mansion. A fitful light blazed in his magnificent eyes, his brow contracted until it assumed that peculiarly battered expression which is at once characteristic of a bent penny and consistent with the most sublime beauty. To be properly appreciated he must be adequately described. Imagine then a young man of twenty, who was filled with the bitterest hatred of the world, which he had forsworn two years ago, on being expelled from school for gambling. There was about him an air of haughty ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 7, 1891. • Various
... the repulsive it may be only the coarse, rough natural character; with the melancholy it may be dyspepsia. You do not form your estimate of what the glorious light of the sun does in gladdening and beautifying the earth, by its vain struggles with mists and fogs; it may fail to make a potato patch sublime or grand, and yet be in itself both sublime and grand. No, you judge of it by objects in themselves calculated to reflect its excellence, by the life and joy it diffuses on all animated nature, and especially by the exquisite beauty it imparts ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... from heaven, or climb The hills of heaven with wasting feet. Songs they can stop that earth found meet, But the stars keep their ageless rhyme; Flowers they can slay that spring thought sweet, But the stars keep their spring sublime; Passions and pleasures can defeat, Actions and agonies control, And life and death, but ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and Josh. dealt exclusively in brandy. Toward evening Josh. proclaimed his intention of "raising" the money, and starting with it that night for the West. He would hide himself until Maroney got out of jail, when he would return and deliver the money over to him. Josh. was sublime in the purity and philanthropy of his motives. He did not want a cent of the money; not he! but he could not consent to see his brother-in-law swindled while he stood by and calmly looked on, without ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... the olden time She made the hearts of dust to flame; And fired us with the hope sublime ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... predecessors by identifying themselves more closely with the development of active life itself. By their creative power they invested the life of the nation and mankind with profounder thought, culminating at last in the most sublime of our possessions—religion. No artist has followed in their course with more determined energy than Richard Wagner, as well he might, for with equal intellectual capacity, the foundation of his education was broader and deeper than ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... unacquainted, and he was so famous a discoverer of antiquities that the superstitious Romans thought that he was in league with the devil. The landscapes of More, though highly praised by Goethe, would appeal to Raeburn little more than did the "sublime" historical designs of Hamilton. They were but dilutions, frequently flavoured with melodramatic sentiment, of the noble convention formulated by Claude and the Poussins. Raeburn, on the other hand, had looked at man and nature inquiringly, and had evolved a manner of expressing the results ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... actions often savored ridiculously of the sublime. Then and there, gazing with folded arms on this fortress of Thespis, the polytechnic man organized his first assault. The next evening ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... Chinese tea is a delicious beverage, but not an ideal. The long woes of his country have robbed him of the zest for the meaning of life. He has become modern, that is to say, old and disenchanted. He has lost that sublime faith in illusions which constitutes the eternal youth and vigour of the poets and ancients. He is an eclectic and politely accepts the traditions of the universe. He toys with Nature, but does not condescend to conquer or worship her. His Leaf-tea is often wonderful ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... be a barrister. As a barrister was his name inscribed in the law-list; as a barrister he had chambers in Figtree Court, Temple; as a barrister he had eaten the allotted number of dinners, which form the sublime ordeal through which the forensic aspirant wades on to fame and fortune. If these things can make a man a barrister, Robert Audley decidedly was one. But he had never either had a brief, or tried to get a brief, or even wished to have a brief ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... length, was realized the sublime conception of a nation in which every citizen lives under two complete and well-rounded systems of laws,—the state law and the federal law,—each with its legislature, its executive, and its judiciary moving one within the other, noiselessly ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... deep hidden springs of loveliness and disinterested devotion. In every clime, and in every age, she has been the pride of her NATION. Her watchfulness is untiring; she who guarded the sepulcher was the first to approach it, and the last to depart from its awful yet sublime scene. Even here, in this highly favored land, we look to her for the security of our institutions, and for our future greatness as a nation. But, strange as it may appear, woman's charms and virtues are ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... about an hour after our anchor was let go, watching this grand manifestation of the power of the Deity, sublime as terrible, terrible as sublime; and then, finding that no improvement suggested itself in our arrangements, and that the Lily rode like a cork over the mountain-billows—though occasionally the comb of a more ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... shall I single to your grateful hearts his pre-eminent worth? Where shall I begin in opening to your view a character throughout sublime? Shall I speak of his warlike achievements, all springing from obedience to his country's will—all directed to his ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... 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
... to think of Michelangelo as a self-withdrawn and solitary worker, living for his art, avoiding the conflict of society, immersed in sublime imaginings. On the whole, this is a correct conception of the man. Many passages of his biography will show how little he actively shared the passions and contentions of the stirring times through which he moved. Yet his temperament exposed him to sudden outbursts of scorn and ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... link between those two ideas! Out of the mouth of babes! Here was orthodoxy scientifically explained at last! The sublime poem of the Christ life was man's attempt to join those two irreconcilable conceptions of God. And since the Sum of human altruism was as much a part of the Unknowable Creative Principle as anything else ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... readers of Russian history, to render unnecessary a more than passing allusion to the circumstance. Among the thousand traits of grandeur recorded of the Hero-Tsar, there are few more affecting and sublime than that commemorated in the anecdote of his indulgence to Menstchikoff, who had betrayed his master's confidence, and committed various acts of peculation and oppression. Peter pardoned his unfaithful but repentant minister, and celebrated this act of generous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... with all this bustle on either hand, the road itself lay solitary. The Arethusa smoked a pipe beside a milestone, and I remember he laid down very exactly all he was to do at Chatillon: how he was to enjoy a cold plunge, to change his shirt, and to await the Cigarette's arrival, in sublime inaction, by the margin of the Loire. Fired by these ideas, he pushed the more rapidly forward, and came, early in the afternoon, and in a breathing heat, to the entering-in of that ill-fated town. Childe Roland to the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... quaint, trim, tidy,neat, spruce, smart, tricksy[obs3]. bright, bright eyed; rosy cheeked, cherry cheeked; rosy, ruddy; blooming, in full bloom. brilliant, shining; beamy[obs3], beaming; sparkling, splendid, resplendent, dazzling, glowing; glossy, sleek. rich, superb, magnificent, grand, fine, sublime, showy, specious. artistic, artistical[obs3]; aesthetic; picturesque, pictorial; fait a peindre[Fr]; well-composed, well grouped, well varied; curious. enchanting &c. (pleasure-giving) 829; becoming &c. (accordant) 23; ornamental &c. 847. undeformed, undefaced, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... impossible," says Nicholas, "to imagine, in the wildest and most picturesque walks of Nature, a sight more sublime and majestic, or which can more forcibly challenge the admiration of the traveller, than ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... absolutely quiet as he ended. The dignity of his utterance had in it even a touch of the sublime, and the elder man was aware of it, felt the force of it, was humbled by it. He stood a moment or two as one irresolute, halting at a difficult choice. Then, with an abrupt lift of the head as though his pride made fierce ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... who believed the Supreme Being to have other than a human form, or to be of less than Almighty power and dimensions. An Indian, who was in the service of the Author during the entire period between childhood and manhood, and used to delight and astonish him with his sublime though most natural conceptions of Infinity and the Godhead, always called him the Great Good Man. The "Prince of the power of the air," he very appositely ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... adjoining the village. The studio of Alexander H. Wyant, who was considered one of America's best landscape artists, is still to be seen amid its picturesque surroundings." No wonder the place was chosen by the artists, for they never would lack for sketches of the most picturesque and sublime character. The work of Indians may be seen on the inner walls of high caves, known as the Indian Rocks, ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn Of miserable aims that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge men's minds To vaster issues. May I reach That purest heaven,—be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony, Enkindle generous ardour, ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... religion permeates his existence. The whole world in which he lives and moves and has his being, in so far as it is not a mere illusion of the senses, is for him an emanation of the omnipresent deity that he worships in a thousand different shapes, from the grotesque to the sublime. ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... tapering formation and perfect filbert nails, I read a likeness whose prototype, struggle how I would, I could not recall. Gradually the hand moved upwards, and, reaching the throat, the fingers set to work, at once, to remove the wrappings. My terror was now sublime! I dare not imagine, I dare not for one instant think, what I should see! And there was no getting away from it; I could not stir an inch, not the fraction of an inch, and the ghastly revelation would take place within ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... smallest size, Fix'd on an elephant his eyes, And jeer'd the beast of high descent Because his feet so slowly went. Upon his back, three stories high, There sat, beneath a canopy, A certain sultan of renown, His dog, and cat, and wife sublime, His parrot, servant, and his wine, All pilgrims to a distant town. The rat profess'd to be amazed That all the people stood and gazed With wonder, as he pass'd the road, Both at the creature and his load. "As if," said he, "to occupy ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... amid the most beautiful and sublime mountain scenery of Virginia, the train stopped twenty minutes for dinner, which, in those ante-bellum days, was well served from the hotel at the depot. After dinner, the train started off again at express speed, stopping but at ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... any pretence of worshipping God is so. And as it is but a step from the ridiculous to the sublime, and as the true worship of God is probably the highest sublimity to which man can reach; so, perhaps, is he never so absolutely absurd, in such a bathos of the ridiculous, as when ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... as possible, to find occupation for him as one does for the convalescent, to hover about him, showering him with manifestations of her love and woman's protectiveness—it had stirred the mother in her, and in the depths of her sorrow there had been a sublime joy. ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... fell at Ball's Bluff." "Why then," asked the manager, "do you feel so deep an interest in this work?" "Our country's cause is the cause of God, and we would do what we can, for His sake," was the sublime reply. ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... ask why a man of such sublime talent should endure such treatment, but the simple fact is Mozart was gentle, yielding, kind—immersed in his music—with no power to set his will against the tide of tendency that 'compassed him round. The Archbishop forbade ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... her to his confidence, and supply her with all the particulars of Regina's history and family, which he withholds even from you and me, and about which we should never dream of catechizing him. In a better cause, her bold effrontery would be sublime. Fortunately she was absent in Vermont for some months after the child came, and curiosity had subsided into indifference until she returned,—when lo! a geyser of righteous anxiety and suspicion boiled up in the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... smile, with its sublime immodesty, that aspiration seemed to Felix infinitely touching. What less could youth want in the very heart of Spring? And, watching her face put up to the night, her parted lips, and the moon-gleam fingering ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... closer than a brother, is Solomon Mahaffy—fallible and failing like the rest of us, but with a sublime capacity for friendship; and closer still, perhaps, clings little Hannibal, a boy about whose parentage nothing is known until the end of the story. Hannibal is charmed into tolerance of the Judge's picturesque vices, while Miss Betty, lovely and capricious, is charmed into placing all her affairs, ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... to all probability, this did not happen,—if God should impose this sublime probation upon the virtue of our friend, if the world were to disown him and Providence were to became to that, degree his debtor,—yet in that case there are, believe me, supreme compensations: all the things and all the events that occur around us and that act upon us are but machines ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... countries and all lands, And made his own the secrets of each clime. Now, ere the world has fully reached its prime, The oval earth lies compassed with steel bands; The seas are slaves to ships that touch all strands, And even the haughty elements sublime And bold, yield him their secrets for all time, And speed like lackeys forth at ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... representation of his Belief about this Universe:—some Critic in a future age, like those Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceased altogether to think as Dante did, may find this too all an 'Allegory,' perhaps an idle Allegory! It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of the soul of Christianity. It expresses, as in huge worldwide architectural emblems, how the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the two polar elements of this Creation, on which it all turns; that these two differ not by ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... master's quarrel; and here art thou admitted into the inviolable enclosure of the Blaquernal, and in the hearing not only of the royal daughter of the imperial arch, which means," said the eloquent leader, "the echo of the sublime vaults; but—Heaven be our guide,—for what I know, within the natural hearing of the Sacred ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... in his incarnations of Satan that Rops is unapproachable. Satan Sowing the Tares of Evil is a sublime conception, truly Miltonic. The bony-legged demon strides across Paris. One foot is posed on Notre Dame. He quite touches the sky. Upon his head is a broad-brimmed peasant's hat, Quaker in shape. Hair streams over his skeleton shoulders. His eyes are gleaming with infernal ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Circus-Day parade! How the bugles played and played! And how the glossy horses tossed their flossy manes, and neighed, As the rattle and the rhyme of the tenor-drummer's time Filled all the hungry hearts of us with melody sublime! ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... intelligence should know how to recognize the mysterious indications, the obscure signs and the involuntary revelation which a wife unwittingly exhibits; for the next Meditation will doubtless indicate the more evident of the manifestations to neophytes in the sublime science of marriage. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... side of the divide, and succeed in reaching the base of the precipices which fell from our feet, it really looked as if we might travel without difficulty among the rocks to the other side of the Kern Valley, and make our attempt upon the southward flank of the great peak. One look at the sublime white giant decided us. We looked down over the precipice, and at first could see no method of descent. Then we went back and looked at the road we had come up, to see if that were not possibly as bad; but the broken surface of the rocks was evidently ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... be the changes produced by man, the eternal round of the seasons is unbroken. Summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, return in their stated order with a sublime precision, affording to man one of the noblest of all the occasions he enjoys of proving the high powers of his far-reaching mind, in compassing the laws that control their exact uniformity, and in calculating ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... which is so effective in impassioned utterance, and in the expression of deep, forcible, and sublime emotions, is nothing more than pure tone increased in extent of volume, and in intensity of force. This modification of pure tone is very full, very rounds very smooth, and very highly resonant or ringing. It is what Dr. Rush regarded as the ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... sacrificed themselves for the happiness of future generations. To die for our country is a glorious death, but to carry with us the curses of thousands, to die despised and hated for the salvation of future millions, oh! that is sublime—it is Messiah-like!" ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... Spain woke a thrill in the people of the United States, for they thought they saw the events of their own revolution repeated in the exploits of San Martin and Bolivar. To the imagination of Henry Clay, this was a sublime spectacle—"eighteen millions of people struggling to burst their chains and be free." He would have had the United States recognize these sister republics and join hands with them in forming an American system independent of Europe. And when the Administration hesitated, he exclaimed: "We look ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... its feel, were not to be described in words. Charles Lamb, with his infinite tact, attempting to, might have drawn charming pictures of the life of his day; Lord Byron in a stanza of Don Juan, aiming at the impossible, might have achieved the sublime; Oscar Wilde, heaping jewels of Ispahan upon brocades of Byzantium, might have created a troubling beauty. Considering it, the mind reeled under visions of the feasts of Elagabalus; and the subtle harmonies of Debussy mingled with the musty, fragrant romance of chests in which have been kept old ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... costs her dear. Ye magian queens of Persia; bewitching Circe; sublime Sibyl! Into what have ye grown, and how cruel the change that has come upon you! She who from her throne in the East taught men the virtues of plants and the courses of the stars; who, on her Delphic tripod beamed over with the god of light, as she gave forth her oracle to a world upon its ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... nothing moved in the heavens above Les Errues except an eagle. And that appeared every day, sheering the blue void above the forest, hovering majestically in circles hour after hour and then, at last, toward sundown, setting its sublime course westward, straight into the blinding disk ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... reached her room he might have thought it broken then. Vague dread of the consequences of an act which, from his words, she believed he knew far more about than he did, mingled with her anger and feelings of repugnance. "Oh," she moaned, "it was just horrible; it was coming straight down from the sublime to the contemptible. That noble old colonel took me to the very gate of heaven. Now I'm fairly trembling with passion and fear. Oh, why will Cousin Mad always stir up the very worst of my feelings! I'd rather suffer and die as poor Yarry did than marry a man who WILL think ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... direction, of a Mr. Nichols following him; and of the Rev. Mr. Townley being much busied on that Preface, wherein Lomazzo rubs shoulders with Michelangelo and Protogenes, and where the modern mortal hears with astonishment of "the sublime part which is a real je ne scai quoi," and which, "being the most important part to all connoisseurs, I shall call a harmonious propriety, which is a touching or moving unity, or ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... civilization, its incalculable material, its wealth, its amazing mechanical resources, its wonderful scientific discoveries, its many-sided literature, its sleepless and ubiquitous journalism, its lovely art, its abounding charities, its awful fears and sublime hopes, we get a magnificent conception of the possibilities of life, as this latest of the centuries draws its purple robe about its majestic form and stands up to die as the old Roman Caesar stood, in all the magnificence of its riches, and the ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... compact and perfect as a Chinese puzzle; an enormous hieroglyphic which man must decipher or die. There fell upon both of them, but upon Turnbull more than the other, because he know more what the scene signified, that quite indescribable sense as of a sublime and passionate and heart-moving futility, which is never evoked by deserts or dead men or men neglected and barbarous, which can only be invoked by the sight of the enormous genius of man applied to anything other ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... into rhythm, you tell What we felt only; you expressed You hold things beautiful the best, And pace them in rhyme so, side by side. 'Tis something, nay 'tis much: but then, Have you yourself what's best for men? Are you—poor, sick, old ere your time— Nearer one whit your own sublime Than we who never have turned a rhyme? Sing, riding's a joy! ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... even imagine the reason, but the tears came to her eyes with a smarting sting, and with them that feeling of overwhelming joy that was half-pain, the feeling that rushed over her so often when her father read some sublime passage from the Scriptures. ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... rear; and as for Joan of Arc, there where she sat her horse gazing, clothed all in white armor, dreamy, beautiful, and in her face a deep, deep joy, a joy not of earth, oh, she was not flesh, she was a spirit! Her sublime mission was closing—closing in flawless triumph. To-morrow she could say, "It is ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... my sheep, and call it even?" chuckled the Anakim; and so, chatting and happy, we glided along, enjoying, not entranced, comfortable, but not sublime, content to drink in the sunny sweetness of the summer day, happy only from the pleasant sense of being, tangling each other in silly talk out of mere wantonness, purling up bubbles of airy nothings in sheer effervescence of animal delight; falling ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Faust [alone]. Spirit sublime, thou gav'st me, gav'st me all For which I prayed. Thou didst not lift in vain Thy face upon me in a flame of fire. Gav'st me majestic nature for a realm, The power to feel, enjoy her. Not alone A freezing, formal visit didst thou grant; Deep down into her breast invitedst me To look, as if she ...
— Faust • Goethe
... at all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is—which was the only way he could get there—thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... citizens, brothers, noble parts of the only sublime and perfect nation, let us not forget that the 21st January cast off our chains; that the 10th August relieved us of the shameful presence of foreign spies; that the 5th September was its own justification ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to which the plateau of Prospect Heights afforded asylum. But even this last retreat was now closed to them, and the lava-torrent, flowing over the edge of the granite wall, began to pour down upon the beach its cataracts of fire. The sublime horror of this spectacle passed all description. During the night it could only be compared to a Niagara of molten fluid, with its incandescent vapors above and ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... recondite revelations of their Geometry, their wonderful laws of mathematical harmonies and unities, and those lines which by common consent are understood to be exponential of certain phases of our own existence. No well-organized intellect can fail to perceive that a sublime and immortal Truth underlies these speculations. Undoubtedly, in the straight line, in the conic sections, in the innumerable composite curves of the mathematician, lie the germs of all these symbolic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... Again, there may be absence of effort and of appearance of preparation. Beethoven would strike haphazard the keys of a piano or would listen to the songs of birds. "With Chopin," says George Sand, "creation was spontaneous, miraculous; he wrought without foreseeing. It would come complete, sudden, sublime." One might pile up like facts in abundance. Sometimes, indeed, inspiration bursts forth in deep sleep and awakens the sleeper, and lest we may suppose this suddenness to be especially characteristic of artists we see it in all forms of invention. "You feel a ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... feasting his spirit on the splendid visions of that Promised Land which, Moses-like, it was permitted him to see prefigured in its earthly type? Throughout his adventures, too generally known to require more than passing allusion, one sees the same passionate devotion to the grand and sublime in sight and sensation, the same calm disregard of danger, whether exploding his balloon at an altitude of thirteen thousand feet and coolly noting the "fearful moaning noise caused by the air rushing through the network and the gas escaping above," preparing to test a lifelong ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... waterfalls, hewing out arches for themselves in the vast drifts, go thundering down from precipices into deep chasms, here and there and everywhere: the blue water tearing through the white snow with an awful beauty that is most sublime. The pass itself, the mere pass over the top, is not so fine, I think, as the Simplon; and there is no plain upon the summit, for the moment it is reached the descent begins. So that the loneliness and wildness of ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Senor Don Jose, yes, Senor Don Cayetano; yes, senora and senorita, science, as the moderns study and propagate it, is the death of sentiment and of every sweet illusion. Under its influence the life of the spirit declines, every thing is reduced to fixed rules, and even the sublime charms of nature disappear. Science destroys the marvellous in the arts, as well as faith in the soul. Science says that every thing is a lie, and would reduce every thing to figures and lines, not only maria ac terras, where we are, but coelumque profundum, where ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... the name will be doomed to the undying contempt of those who cultivate the mysterious and the sublime—Mr. Blotton, we say, with the doubt and cavilling peculiar to vulgar minds, presumed to state a view of the case, as degrading as ridiculous. Mr. Blotton, with a mean desire to tarnish the lustre of the immortal ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... blacks picked up the dung of the ostrich, and a horn of the aoudad. Here and there we observed the broken columns of Roman milestones, some of them covered with illegible inscriptions. The sockets generally remain perfect. We saluted the memory of the sublime road-makers. ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... pieces of mine have hitherto under the starres passed the public view, come now of right to be under the predomination of a power that both contains all their perfections and hath influences of a more sublime nature. I could not but also take in this part (whereof time had worn out the edition) which the world had long since had of mine and lay it at your sacred feet as a memorial of my devoted duty, and to show that where I am I must be all I am and cannot stand ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... to the box in the chapel, made me a welcome sojourner beyond the limited period allowed to travellers, and I felt less and less inclined to quit the scene. My amusement was climbing the most frightful precipices, followed by the large and faithful dogs, and viewing nature in her wildest and most sublime attire. At other times, when bodily fatigue required rest, I sat down, with morbid melancholy, in the receptacle for the bodies of those unfortunate persons who had perished in the snow. There would I remain for hours, musing on their fate: the purity of ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of a child; the second, higher up, might have been interpreted as an echo to the innocent interrogation of the first, the head no wiser than the heart; but the third and last note had nothing in it of interrogation: it was an answer, all-satisfying—sublime. Nor did it seem to come from John at all, but from above, falling like a snowflake out ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Abbey, but don't expect me to describe it, that's impossible, so I'll only say it was sublime! This evening we are going to see Fechter, which will be an appropriate end to the happiest ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... mammalia nearly absolute identity of anatomical structure, bone for bone, muscle for muscle, nerve for nerve—similar organs performing like functions. It is not by a vertical position on his feet, the os sublime of Ovid, which he shares with the penguin, nor by his mental faculties, which, though more developed, are fundamentally the same as those of animals, nor by his powers of perception, will, memory, and a certain ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... many of the guests have finished, and, since there is no pretense of ceremony, the banquet begins to break up. Some of the men gather about the bar; some wander about, laughing and singing; here and there will be a little group, chanting merrily, and in sublime indifference to the others and to the orchestra as well. Everybody is more or less restless—one would guess that something is on their minds. And so it proves. The last tardy diners are scarcely given time to finish, ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... of sublime and serious art only. It is true of cynical, profligate, and concupiscent art as well. It is true of Congreve as it is true of Sophocles; it is true of Mademoiselle de Maupin as it is true of Measure for Measure. This art differs from the former in ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... to show her how much she lost of the sublime and inspiring things of the past. He took the story of Jesus. It mattered not in the least if it was fiction or fact—it was there, as an achievement of the human spirit. He showed her the man of the gospels—not the stained-glass ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... pale, academic blood trickling through his veins, but a man who, with unsoured mien, with fresh, buoyant delight, offers the world the results laboriously reached in his study, after all evidences of toil and moil have been carefully removed; who derives inspiration from the noble and the sublime in whatever guise it may appear, and who knows how to communicate his inspiration ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... to the perception of beauty in the narrow sense will apply to all other modes of aesthetic intuition, as that of the sublime and the ludicrous, and the recognition of the opposite of beauty or the ugly. In like manner, it will apply to moral intuition in so far as it is an instantaneous recognition of a certain quality in a perceived action based on, ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... have constrained me to undertake, is one which they themselves could have executed more competently, but they were averse to distract their attention from the higher contemplations and sublime pursuits to which they are devoted, in order to turn their thoughts and pens to things of the earth earthy. I, therefore, in obedience to their orders, have rendered the whole substance of the Book into such plain Latin as was ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... books Mr. Baum lived with his characters. They have every element of the drama of life as it begins within the lives of children. The two stories are a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous; the foibles and fancies of childhood, interspersed ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... the five acts of her tragedy. I saw that my exclamation had been repeated to her, and that a universal anathema was thundered at the rustic boor, at the barbarian impudent enough to dare to be witty by Monsieur Mery's side, and to affect to be insensible to the sublime beauties of "Cleopatre." However, all was not yet lost; I had unconsciously another way of conquering Madame de Girardin's favor. Her countenance became wreathed in smiles, she advanced towards me, and said, in a honeyed tone,—"Well, Count, give me some tidings of ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... natural. For one of the most celebrated metempsychoses of Buddha is that detailed in the Sasa Jataka (Fausbll, No. 316, tr. R. Morris, Folk-Lore Journal, ii. 336), in which the Buddha, as a hare, performs a sublime piece of self-sacrifice, and as a reward is translated to the moon, where he can be seen to this day as "the hare in the moon." Every Buddhist is reminded of the virtue of self-sacrifice whenever the moon is full, and it is easy to understand how the Buddha ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... always a hero. This explains that grand distinction between Heathen and Christian art, of which I spoke in the commencement; that expression of power blended with agony,—of celestial beatitude refining itself upon the face of grief. Christianity has made martyrdom sublime, and sorrow triumphant. Christ is "the Captain of our salvation,"-the leader of "many sons unto glory;" for he was "a man of sorrows, and acquainted ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... between the bedroom at the back and the back parlor, between the parlor and the shop, between the shop and the dispensing-room, Fulleymore Ransome dragged himself to and fro, more than ever weedy, more than ever morose, more than ever sublime in his appearance of integrity; and with it all so irritable that Ranny's children had to be kept out of his way. He would snarl when he heard them overhead; he would scowl horribly when he came across the "pram," pushed by the little girl, in its necessary ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... most brilliant society of Paris. Thanks to the sublime privileges of genius. You may appear in all the salons of the Faubourg St. Germain, and be cordially received. You have the exquisite enjoyment of the company of the two or three celebrated women of our age, where so many good things are said, where ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... now. 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
... frivolous pretension that his street of the Calimara was the centre of our city. And here we are at the sign of 'Apollo and the Razor.' Apollo, you see, is bestowing the razor on the Triptolemus of our craft, the first reaper of beards, the sublime Anonimo, whose mysterious identity is ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... which the wicked perpetrate in their folly."[6] It was in a theatre at Athens that the chorus of a tragedy sang, more than two thousand years ago: "May destiny aid me to preserve unsullied the purity of my words and of all my actions, according to those sublime laws which, brought forth in the celestial heights, have Heaven alone for their father, to which the race of mortal men did not give birth, and which oblivion shall never entomb. In them is a supreme God, and one ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... windows. And the woman, who, with dry eyes, was now standing at one of them looking out at the splendour, at the refreshing, glorious morning that was more sparkling than ever before, felt vanquished by the power of nature. It was too great, too sublime, too irresistible—she must bend the knee admiringly before nature, however veiled her eyes were. Kate stood a long time in deep thought. Outside was life, here in the room was death. But death is not the greatest evil. She turned round with a trembling ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... long existed to my presenting the public with a perfect edition of Shelley's Poems. These being at last happily removed, I hasten to fulfil an important duty,—that of giving the productions of a sublime genius to the world, with all the correctness possible, and of, at the same time, detailing the history of those productions, as they sprang, living and warm, from his heart and brain. I abstain from any remark on the occurrences of his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... teeming with instances where the love of creatures, and even the holier and more sublime love of the Creator, have, in moments of enthusiasm, induced tender females to forget the weakness of their sex and successfully fulfil the spheres of manhood. These scenes, so censurable, are extraordinary more from the rarity of their ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... made during the past year to remove the hindrances to the proclamation of the treaty of naturalization with the Sublime Porte, signed in 1874, which has remained inoperative owing to a disagreement of interpretation of the clauses relative to the effects of the return to and sojourn of a naturalized citizen in the land of origin. I trust soon to be able to announce a favorable settlement of the differences ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... his full height and stood there towering over her, the very effigy of sublime fatherhood. "She is not guilty!" he ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... was singularly gifted with these qualifications, particularly with that sublime possession of the mind, which constitutes the essence of a ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... characterized by sublime enthusiasm, self-sacrifice, and devotion, not only by the patriots but by loyalists who conscientiously adhered to the crown. In our admiration of those who secured the independence of the Colonies, we have overlooked the sacrifices and sufferings of the loyalists;—their distress during the siege ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... imagination, the least of that which is calculated to meet the approbation of the Christian, or even of the mere Moralist; and in conclusion he will take the liberty of addressing to those who may feel within them the stirrings of a mind capable of mighty things, the sublime words, slightly modified, of an Arabian sage and poet: O man, though the years of thy worldly fame are destined to be equal in number to the doves of the heaven, they shall nevertheless have an end, but whatever thou ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... that they could explain them in Germany. In his fatuous, insular way, it pleased him to regard them rather as a species of aborigines benefiting by English civilization. The English Ass and the German Ass are touchingly alike. The shade of difference is that the English Ass's sublime self-satisfaction is in the German Ass self-glorification. The English Ass smirks and plumes himself; the German Ass blusters ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Can He not reach thee with His tender care? Can He not hear me when for thee I pray? Somewhere thou livest and hast need of Him, Somewhere thy soul sees higher heights to climb, And somewhere, too, there may be valleys dim Which thou must pass to reach the heights sublime. Then all the more because thou canst not hear Poor human words of blessing will I pray. O, true brave heart, God bless thee wheresoe'er In God's wide universe ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... Morning, by E. Goodall, from Linton's "joyful" picture; Sir W. Scott in his Study (qy. the forehead); a little "Monkeyana," by Landseer; Chillon, by Wallis, from a drawing by Clarkson Stanfield—a sublime picture; Fonthill, an exquisite scene from one of Turner's drawings; Beatrice, from a picture by Howard; the Lake View of Newstead, after Danby; the Snuff-Box, from Stephanoff; and last, though not least, Gainsborough's charming Young Cottagers, transferred to steel, by J.H. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... well, Printed an' bound in little books; but why don't poets tell? I'm sick of all their quirks an' turns—the loves an' doves they dream— Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o' Steam! To match wi' Scotia's noblest speech yon orchestra sublime Whaurto—uplifted like the Just—the tail-rods mark the time. The crank-throws give the double-bass; the feed-pump sobs an' heaves: An' now the main eccentrics start their quarrel on the sheaves. Her time, her own appointed ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... so largely acquired—the tide of which, sometimes diverted by transient causes, has always returned with accumulated force. With him it is no 'echo of folly, and shadow of renown,' but a deep, affecting, almost sublime national feeling, which exults in him as the living representative of national glory. If there be an exception in any place to this universal sentiment, let us hope that the impression will not endure, that the cloud of momentary ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... regret to the President that the object of the raid had not been accomplished. "Pick the flint, and try it again," said Mr. Lincoln, heartily. I went out from his presence awed by the courage and sublime simplicity of the man. While he gave the impression that he was bearing the nation on his heart, one was made to feel that it was also large enough for sympathy with all striving with ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... to the very brink of civil war. Two centuries back—yes, exactly to a month, two centuries—we were all at Marston Moor, cutting throats upon the largest scale. And why? under the coercion of principles equally sublime on both sides. Then it did urge us into war. Now it does not—because the resistance is stronger, and by no means because the impulse is less. On a May morning in 1844, a question arises in the senate as to factory labour. On one side it shows an aspect critical for the interests ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... things. It was like a vision, and it held me spell-bound, as I stood shivering on the rocks with the white mist round my knees until into my wool-gathering mind came the memory of those anything but sublime men of mine; and I turned and scuttled off along the rocks like an agitated ant left ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... wretched apartment on rue Froidmanteau. The musician, an accomplished theorist, could not interpret intelligently any of his remarkable ideas and he would play to his wondering auditors jumbled compositions which he thought to be sublime inspirations. However he enthusiastically analyzed "Robert le Diable," having heard Meyerbeer's masterpiece while a guest of Andrea Marcosini. In 1837 he was reduced to mending musical instruments, and occasionally he went with his wife to sing duets in the open ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... and the Chimpanzee; and the wooden Caffres and New-Zealanders; and the Shakespeare House; and Le Grand Blondin, and Le Petit Blondin; and Handel; and Mozart; and no end of shops, and buns, and beer; and all the little-Pthah-worshippers say, never was anything so sublime! ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... almost disposed to suggest that the atom of argon (or of krypton, helium, neon, or zenon, for the same thing applies to each and all of these) seems the most perfect thing known to us in the world, for it needs no companionship, it is self-sufficing. There is something sublime about this magnificient isolation, this splendid self-reliance, this undaunted and undauntable self-sufficiency—these are traits which the world is wont to ascribe to beings more than mortal. But let us pause lest we push too far into the old, discredited territory ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... documents, was a native of Mayence. This great architect began by rebuilding the nave, the arch-roofs of which were completed in 1275. Then he commenced the facade of the church and its towers from a plan so bold and sublime that the conception of it places Erwin for ever at the head of the architects of the middle age[1]. In 1276 they laid the foundation of the northern tower; to consecrate the spot, the bishop walked solemnly round it, then took a trowel in his hand and thrust it into the ground, ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... carried from him on the sweeping wind as fast as the words were spoken, seemed to exalt him still more. Even the raging of the elements round him appeared to add to his exaltation. To him it seemed that these manifestations were obedient to his own will. He had reached the sublime of his madness; he was now in his own mind actually the Almighty, and whatever might happen would be the direct carrying out of his own commands. As he could not see Mimi, nor fix whereabout ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... the darkness that sin hath spread over its face is removed. The soul is an intelligent power, it can be made to know and understand depths, and heights, and lengths, and breadths, in those high, sublime, and spiritual mysteries that only God can reveal and teach; yea, it is capable of diving unutterably into them. And herein is God, the God of glory, much delighted and pleased—to wit, that He hath made Himself a creature that is capable of hearing, of knowing, and of understanding ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan |
