Vastness Quotes (page 8)
Evading all the boredom, all the vast chagrin / That load their heaviness upon this fog-bound life, / Happy is he who on a stalwart wing can knife / Across the haze to meadows shining and serene! Happy is he whose thoughts soar like the lark to sing, / As through the morning skies, in freedom, he ascends, / - Who, gazing down on life, completely comprehends / The language of the flowers and every speechless thing!
Charles Baudelaire
Flying to Monterey I had a sharp apprehension of the many times before when I had, like Lincoln Steffens, "come back," flown west, followed the sun, each time experiencing a lightening of spirit as the land below opened up, the checkerboards of the midwestern plains giving way to the vast empty reach between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada; then home, there, where I was from, me, California. It would be a while before I realized that “me” is what we think when our parents die, even at my...
Joan Didion
We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
Carl Sagan
I could not forbear getting up to the top of a little mountain, and looking out to sea, in hopes of seeing a ship : then fancy that, at a vast distance, I spied a sail, please myself with the hopes of it, and, after looking steadily, till I was almost blind, lose it quite, and sit down and weep like a child, and thus increase my misery by my folly.
Daniel Defoe
Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge....wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be. Just because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is...
George Eliot
It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, or a rich country inhabited by starving people... Who indeed could afford to ignore science today? At every turn we have to seek its aid... The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.
Jawaharlal Nehru
I met a traveller from an antique land. Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone. Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown. And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command. Tell that its sculptor well those passions read. Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear:'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and...
Percy Bysshe Shelley