Though thou have time
But for a line, be that sublime. [ Lowell ]
Like a dart the present glances,
Silent stands the past sublime. [ Schiller ]
Lives of great men all remind us,
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of Time. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
The sublime is in a grain of dust. [ Landor ]
Oh, fear not in a world like this.
And thou shalt know ere long, -
Know how sublime a thing it is,
To suffer and be strong. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Light Of Stars ]
Stupidity has its sublime as well as genius. [ Wieland ]
There is nothing I know of so sublime as a fact. [ George Canning ]
Eloquence is to the sublime as a whole to its part. [ La Bruyère ]
Eternal Hope! when yonder spheres sublime
Pealed their first notes to sound the march of Time,
Thy joyous youth began - but not to fade -
When all thy sister planets have decayed; [ Thomas Campbell ]
The truly sublime is always easy, and always natural. [ Burke ]
Eloquence is to the sublime what the whole is to its part. [ La Bruyere ]
The life of great geniuses is nothing but a sublime storm. [ George Sand ]
Christianity has made martyrdom sublime, and sorrow triumphant. [ Chapin ]
I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power. [ Burke ]
To forgive a fault in another is more sublime than to be faultless one's self. [ George Sand ]
For what are men who grasp at praise sublime, but bubbles on the rapid stream of time? [ Young ]
Among all animals, from man to the dog, the heart of a mother is always a sublime thing. [ A. Dumas pere ]
A sublime idea remains the same, from whatever brain or in whatever region it has its birth. [ Menzel ]
What a sublime doctrine it is, that goodness cherished now is eternal life already entered on! [ Channing ]
He who has not forgiven an enemy has never yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life. [ Lavater ]
Music is not a science any more than poetry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds. [ Ouida ]
It is the treating of the common-place with the feeling of the sublime that gives to art its true power. [ J. F. Millet ]
A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime. [ Ruskin ]
What wonderful things are events! The least are of greater importance than the most sublime and comprehensive soeculations. [ Beaconsfield ]
Teach self-denial, and make its practice pleasurable, and you create for the world a destiny more sublime than ever issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer. [ Scott ]
Sublime is the dominion of the mind over the body, that for a time, can make flesh and nerve impregnable, and string the sinews like steel, so that the weak become so mighty. [ Mrs. Stowe ]
But the sublime, when it is introduced at a seasonable moment, has often carried all before it with the rapidity of lightning, and shown at a glance the mighty power of genius. [ Longinus ]
Sensual pleasures are like soap bubbles, sparkling, evanescent. The pleasures of intellect are calm, beautiful, sublime, ever enduring and climbing upward to the borders of the unseen world. [ Aughey ]
The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous; and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again. [ Thomas Paine ]
There is power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements hold him to his task; what has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in use. [ R. W. Emerson ]
A miser is sometimes a grand personification of fear. He has a fine horror of poverty; and he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm's length, but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance! [ Lamb ]
Magnificence is likewise a source of the sublime. A great profusion of things which are splendid or valuable in themselves is magnificent. The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur. [ Burke ]
Poetry can make even the thought of death beautiful, and the sadness of bereavement not without a certain pleasure. Great poets have elicited from the sternest suffering a principle of enjoyment. Sublime faith and earnest love can conjure spirits the most lovely from the darkest abyss. [ Tuckerman ]
We meet with few utterly dull and stupid souls: the sublime and transcendent are still fewer; the generality of mankind stand between, these two extremes: the interval is filled with multitudes of ordinary geniuses, but all very useful, and the ornaments and supports of the commonwealth. [ La Bruyere ]
O poets! what injury you have done us, and how right Plato was to banish you from his republic! How your ambrosia has rendered more bitter our absinth! How have we found our lives more barren and more desolate, after having turned our eyes toward the sublime perspectives which your dreams have opened in the infinite! [ T. Gautier ]
The clear conception, outrunning the deductions of logic, the high purpose, the dauntless spirit, speaking on the tongue, beaming from the eye, informing every feature, and urging the whole man onward, right onward, to his object - this is eloquence, or rather it is something greater and higher than all eloquence - it is action, noble, sublime, godlike action. [ Webster ]
Since I have known God in a saving manner, painting, poetry, and music have had charms unknown to me before. I have received what I suppose is a taste for them, or religion has refined my mind and made it susceptible of impressions from the sublime and beautiful. O, how religion secures the heightened enjoyment of those pleasures which keep so many from God, by their becoming a source of pride! [ Henry Martyn ]
Young people are dazzled by the brilliancy of antithesis, and employ it. Matter-of-fact men, and those who like precision, naturally fall into comparisons and metaphor. Sprightly natures, full of fire, and whom a boundless imagination carries beyond all rules, and even what is reasonable, cannot rest satisfied even with hyperbole. As for the sublime, it is only great geniuses and those of the very highest order that are able to rise to its height. [ Bruyere ]