“The Bible is like a wide and beautiful landscape seen afar off, dim and confused; but a good telescope will bring it near, and spread out all its rocks and trees and flowers and v__ulant fields and winding rivers at one's very feet. That telescope is the Spirit's teaching.”

— Thomas Chalmers

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 317.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The Bible is like a wide and beautiful landscape seen afar off, dim and confused; but a good telescope will bring it ne…" by Thomas Chalmers?

Thomas Chalmers 18

Scottish mathematician and a leader of the Free Church of S… 1780–1847

Related quotes

“The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope, then he sees worlds beyond; but, if he looks at his telescope, then he does not see anything but that.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887)

“In the future equilibrium of spirit and matter a clear vision may be obtained. But now only fragments are to be seen. That is why the ancients guarded this natural telescope so cautiously. The most powerful telescopes were women, and the first requisite for their protection was quietude.”

Helena Roerich (1879–1955) Russian philosopher

125
Leaves of Morya’s Garden: Book Two: Illumination (1925)

“Probably even more than the architecture I'd be drawn to landscape. That's my first love, landscape... All kinds of landscape, if it's not cluttered up and vandalised. Yesterday we went out to Blenheim, and I love the flatness and the trees. I like all kinds. And where I'm from, the central valley of Virginia, is not one of the most exciting landscapes in the world, but it's one of the most beautiful. It's very beautiful because it has everything. It has mountains, there are streams, there are fields, beautiful trees. And architecture sits very well in it... And I've always lived in the south of Italy, because it’s more excitable. It's volcanic. The land affects people naturally, that's part of the characteristics, for me, of a people, in a sense.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

Source: 2000 - 2011, Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (June 2000), p. 173

“You see the rivers running east. Then you see mountains rise. Rivers run off them to the west. Mountains come up like waves. They crest, break, and spread themselves westward. When they are spent, there is an interval of time, and then again you see the rivers running eastward. You look over the shoulder of the painter and you see all that in the landscape. You see it if first you have seen it in the rock. The composition is almost infinitely less than the sum of its parts, the flickers and glimpses of a thousand million years.”

John McPhee (1931) American writer

In Suspect Terrain (1983), reprinted in Annals of the Former World (2000) page 209.

“The beauty, the spirit of Germany, its sun, moon, stars, rocks, seas and rivers can never be expressed this way..”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

Quote of Friedrich, shortly after his return in 1798; as quoted in C. D. Friedrich by H.W. Grohn; Kindlers Malerei Lexicon, Zurich, 1965, II p. 46; as cited & transl. by Linda Siegel in Caspar David Friedrich and the Age of German Romanticism, Boston Branden Press Publishers, 1978, p. 17
Friedrich's quote is referring to the typical landscape and atmosphere of Denmark, he intensively experienced for four years. In 1798 Friedrich left Copenhagen and returned to Germany, to Dresden
1794 - 1840