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Immensity Quotes

Quotes tagged as "immensity" Showing 1-16 of 16
Carl Sagan
“In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.

[Dedication to Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, in Cosmos]”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Mina Loy
“There is no Space or Time
Only intensity,
And tame things
Have no immensity”
Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems

Gaston Bachelard
“Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.”
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Gaston Bachelard
“Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it." Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.”
Gaston Bachelard

Herman Melville
“[T]hen all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Nadia Scrieva
“The heart knows the immensity it wants to achieve, but it is limited.”
Nadia Scrieva

Hark Herald Sarmiento
“I used to capture the vastness and the immensity of the world and confine it to the limited pages of the parchment.”
Hark Herald Sarmiento

Honoré de Balzac
“Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones.”
Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass's Skin

Craig D. Lounsbrough
“To think that we grasp the fullness of life is to say that by holding a mere drop of water in our hands we are able to understand the immensity of the ocean.”
Craig D. Lounsbrough

Robert G. Ingersoll
“All the seeds of Christianity -- of superstition, were sown in my mind and
cultivated with great diligence and care.

All that time I knew nothing of any science -- nothing about the other side -- nothing of the objections that had been urged against the blessed Scriptures, or against the perfect Congregational creed. Of course I had heard the ministers speak of blasphemers, of infidel wretches, of scoffers who laughed at holy things. They did not answer their arguments, but they tore their characters into shreds and demonstrated by the fury of assertion that they had done the Devil's work. And yet in spite of all I heard -- of all I read. I could not quite believe. My brain and heart said No.

For a time I left the dreams, the insanities, the illusions and delusions, the nightmares of theology. I studied astronomy, just a little -- I examined maps of the heavens -- learned the names of some of the constellations -- of some of the stars -- found something of their size and the velocity with which they wheeled in their orbits -- obtained a faint conception of astronomical spaces -- found that some of the known stars were so far away in the depths of space that their light, traveling at the rate of nearly two hundred thousand miles a second, required many years to reach this little world -- found that, compared with the great stars, our earth was but a grain of sand -- an atom – found that the old belief that all the hosts of heaven had been created for the benefit of man, was infinitely absurd.”
Robert G. Ingersoll

J. Krishnamurti
“As one sat in the aeroplane amidst all the noise, smoking and loud talking, most unexpectedly, the sense of immensity and that extraordinary benediction which was felt at il L., that imminent feeling of sacredness, began to take place. The body was nervously tense because of the crowd, noise, etc. but in spite of all this, it was there. The pressure and the strain were intense and there was acute pain at the back of the head. There was only this state and there was no observer. The whole body was wholly in it and the feeling of sacredness was so intense that a groan escaped from the body and passengers were sitting in the next seats. It went on for several hours, late into the night. It was as though one was looking, not with eyes only but with a thousand centuries; it was altogether a strange occurrence. The brain was completely empty, all reaction had stopped; during all those hours, one was not aware of this emptiness but only in writing it is the thing known, but this knowledge is only descriptive and not real. That the brain could empty itself is an odd phenomenon. As the eyes were closed, the body, the brain seemed to plunge into unfathomable depths, into states of incredible sensitivity and beauty. The passenger in the next seat began to ask something and having replied, this intensity was there; there was no continuity but only being. And dawn was coming leisurely and the clear sky was filling with light - As this is being written late in the day, with sleepless fatigue, that sacredness is there. The pressure and the strain too.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti, Krishnamurtis Notebook

Walter William Safar
“A man's heart is small, but it is surrounded by the immensity of its soul. Sometimes our words may appear silent, but they are certainly heading for infinity.”
Walter William Safar

Zidrou
“To all the fish, big or small. May a wave carry you to the top of a tree some day. And from that summit, may you contemplate the immensity of the ocean.”
Zidrou & Aimée de Jongh, L'obsolescence programmée de nos sentiments

James Rozoff
“No, not conquer, that is too foolish a world. Any man who scales a mountain is still but a man, a transient speck compared to the immensity and permanence of a mountain .”
James Rozoff, Stories Light And Dark: Nine Short Stories

Maxine Hong Kingston
“Ocean people are different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don’t sleep like eyes. Those who live by the sea examine the driftwood and glass balls that float from foreign ships. They let scores of invisible imps loose out of found bottles. In a scoop of salt water, they revive the dead blobs that have been beached in storms and tides: fins, whiskers, and gills unfold; mouths, eyes, and colors bloom and spread. Sometimes ocean people are given to understand the newness and oldness of the world; then all morning they try to keep that boundless joy like a little sun inside their chests. The ocean also makes its people know immensity.”
Maxine Hong Kingston

Jean-Henri Fabre
“A living speck-the merest dab of life-capable of pleasure and pain, is far more interesting to me than all the immensities of mere matter.”
Jean Fabre