“Some of the most profound truths about us are things that we stop saying in the middle.”
Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story
“Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.”
—
W. H. Auden
,
book
Forewords and Afterwords
"Un Homme d'Esprit", p. 361
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
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W. H. Auden 122
Anglo-American poet 1907–1973Related quotes
Robert Oppenheimer
(1904–1967) American theoretical physicist and professor of physics
As quoted in "Why Curiosity Driven Research?" by Robert V. Moody (17 February 1995) http://www.math.mun.ca/~edgar/moody.html
“But the hunted news I get from some obscure patients' eyes is not trivial. It is profound”
The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (1951), Ch. 54: The Practice
General sources
Context: What is the use of reading the common news of the day, the tragic deaths and abuses of daily living, when for over half a lifetime we have known that they must have occurred just as they have occurred given the conditions that cause them? There is no light in it. It is trivial fill-gap. We know the plane will crash, the train be derailed. And we know why. No one cares, no one can care. We get the news and discount it, we are quite right in doing so. It is trivial. But the hunted news I get from some obscure patients' eyes is not trivial. It is profound: whole academies of learning, whole ecclesiastical hierarchies are founded upon it and have developed what they call their dialectic upon nothing else, their lying dialectics. A dialectic is any arbitrary system, which, since all systems are mere inventions, is necessarily in each case a false premise, upon which a closed system is built shutting out those who confine themselves to it from the rest of the world. All men one way or another use a dialectic of some sort into which they are shut, whether it be an Argentina or a Japan. So each group is maimed. Each is enclosed in a dialectic cloud, incommunicado, and for that reason we rush into wars and prides of the most superficial natures.
Do we not see that we are inarticulate? That is what defeats us.
James Baldwin
(1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States
Source: The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985
Frank Wilczek
(1951) physicist
Source: The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces (2008), Ch. 1, p. 12.
Stephen Jay Gould
(1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist
"The Creation Myths of Cooperstown", p. 46
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)
Niels Bohr
(1885–1962) Danish physicist
As quoted by his son Hans Bohr in "My Father", published in Niels Bohr: His Life and Work (1967), p. 328
Unsourced variant: The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
As quoted in Max Delbrück, Mind from Matter: An Essay on Evolutionary Epistemology, (1986) p. 167. It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth
“All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.”
Bk. XIV, ch. 1
Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852)