Only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in ...creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small- minded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dogma of the mystic offices of Christ being dropped, and he standing on his genius as a moral teacher, 'tis impossible to main...tain the old emphasis of his personality; and it recedes, as all persons must, before the sublimity of the moral laws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, empha...tic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications which frequently invest the facade of a prison with far more dignity than is found in the facade of a palace double its size lent to this health a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas, if times be not fair!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons a...nd the sublimity of prayer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either dire...ction apparently.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bible worship, though at its best it may achieve sublimity by keeping its head in the skies, may also make itself both ridiculous ...and dangerous by having its feet off the ground.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For the most part we think that there are few degrees of sublimity, and that the highest is but little higher than that which we n...ow behold; but we are always deceived. Sublimer visions appear, and the former pale and fade away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We were soon at the Aboljacarmegus Falls.... It seemed as if it needed only a little familiarity, and a little more skill, to navi...gate down such falls as Niagara itself with safety. At any rate, I should not despair of such men in the rapids above Table Rock, until I saw them actually go over the falls, so cool, so collected, so fertile in resources are they. One might have thought that these were falls, and that falls were not to be waded through with impunity, like a mud-puddle. There was really danger of their losing their sublimity in losing their power to harm us. Familiarity breeds contempt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well.... In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »