Quotes about darkness (3456 quotes, page 3)

“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Misattributed
Variant: When its dark enough you can see the stars.

Hope , Star

“We shall have made such a blaze that men will remember us on the other side or the dark.”

Rosemary Sutcliff (1920–1992) English author

Men

“All the roads are dark. Only at the end is there a hope of light.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book The Darkest Road

Source: The Darkest Road

Hope , Light

“A window within the soul to see
Light and Magick I send with thee
Be strong, be brave, make the right choice
Though Darkness shouts with a terrible voice
Know that I am watching from above
And that always, always, the answer is love!”

P. C. Cast book Awakened

Source: Awakened

Love , Soul , Light , Strong

“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

People

“There's light and joy, but there's also darkness all around and we can be lost in it.”

David Almond book Kit's Wilderness

Source: Kit's Wilderness

Light , Joy

“Alexander knew that before he had light instead of darkness, he had to deserve light instead of darkness.”

Paullina Simons book The Bronze Horseman

Source: The Bronze Horseman

Light

“The way to get rid of darkness is with light; the way to overcome cold is with heat; the way to overcome the negative thought is to substitute the good thought. Affirm the good, and the bad will vanish."

- The power of your subconcious mind”

Joseph Murphy The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

Source: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

Way , Light

“I will bring you flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you
what spring does with the cherry trees.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Mountain , Spring , Flowers , Kiss

“I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Night

“You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Truth , Light , Sun

“We walk in dark places no others will enter. We stand on the bridge and no one may pass. We live for the One. We die for the One. -- the Ranger oath”

J. Michael Straczynski (1954) American writer and television producer

“He felt that the darkness was full of unimaginable horrors - and the trouble with unimaginable horrors was that they were only too easy to imagine…”

Terry Pratchett book The Light Fantastic

Source: The Light Fantastic

Imagination

“Ohmygod. Did hell just freeze over?" - Zoey Redbird when Aphrodite LaFonte tells her parents that Zoey deserves to be leader of the Dark Daughters”

P. C. Cast book Betrayed

Source: Betrayed

Hell , Parent , Daughters

“An empty day, though clear and bright,
Is just as dark as any night.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

Night

“This thing of darkness I
Acknowledge mine.”

William Shakespeare The Tempest

Source: The Tempest

“The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness cannot understand it”

Ted Dekker book House

Source: House

Understanding , Light

“In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: The Library at Night

Light , Reading

“Tonight’s December thirty-first,
Something is about to burst.
The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark, it's midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year!”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

Source: Collected verse from 1929 on

New Year , Children , Time

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Pain , People , Soul , Imagination

“Everything that ever happened to you, you experienced right within you. Light and darkness, pain and pleasure, agony and ecstasy—all of it happened within you. If someone touches your hand right now, you may think you are experiencing their hand, but the fact of the matter is you are only experiencing the sensations in your own hand. The whole experience is contained within. All human experience is one hundred percent self-created.”

Sadhguru book Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Pain , Pleasure , Thinking , Light

“Those who are unaware they are walking in darkness will never seek the light.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Light

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.”

August Wilson (1945–2005) American playwright

Courageous , Angels , Forgiveness , Singing

“Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.”

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) Austrian writer

Source: The Burning Secret and other stories

Intelligence , Passion

“Have you ever felt despair? Absolute hopelessness? Have you ever stood in the darkness and known, deep in your heart, in your spirit, that it was never, ever going to get better? That something had been lost, forever, and that it wasn't coming back?”

Jim Butcher book Storm Front

Source: Storm Front

Heart , Despair

“By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two
together in their sleep will defeat the darkness”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Source: 100 Love Sonnets

Love , Sleep , Heart , Night

“The malicious have a dark happiness.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Happiness

“Hester, in the dark conclusion of Hawthorne's brooding novel, reassumes the Puritan mantle…. Hawthorne thus captures the catch-22 of feminism: the very woman who is able to envision a new order of living is, by the same token, unable, since the passion that enables her also adulterates her in the eyes of the Puritans. Released from goodness, she is imprisoned in badness, within the framework of the puritanical order. But her mind is free to question the order.”

Carol Gilligan (1936) American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist

Source: Joining the Resistance

Question , Passion

“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Illusions

Widely attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson on the internet; however, a presumably definitive source of Emerson's works at http://www.rwe.org fails to confirm any occurrence of this phrase across his works. This phrase is found in remarks attributed to Charles A. Beard in Arthur H. Secord, "Condensed History Lesson", Readers' Digest, February 1941, p. 20; but the origin has not been determined. Possibly confused with a passage in "Illusions" in which Emerson discusses his experience in the "Star Chamber": "our lamps were taken from us by the guide, and extinguished or put aside, and, on looking upwards, I saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars glimmering more or less brightly over our heads, and even what seemed a comet flaming among them. All the party were touched with astonishment and pleasure. Our musical friends sung with much feeling a pretty song, “The stars are in the quiet sky,” &c., and I sat down on the rocky floor to enjoy the serene picture. Some crystal specks in the black ceiling high overhead, reflecting the light of a half–hid lamp, yielded this magnificent effect."
Misattributed

Hope , Star

“Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bares it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.”

Stephen King book The Green Mile

Variant: Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.
Source: The Green Mile

Time

“I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.”

Emile Zola J’accuse…!

Source: J'accuse! (1898)
Context: In making these accusations I am aware that I am making myself liable to articles 30 and 31 of the law of 29/7/1881 regarding the press, which make libel a punishable offence. I expose myself to that risk voluntarily.
As for the people I am accusing, I do not know them, I have never seen them, and I bear them neither ill will nor hatred. To me they are mere entities, agents of harm to society. The action I am taking is no more than a radical measure to hasten the explosion of truth and justice.
I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul. Let them dare, then, to bring me before a court of law and let the enquiry take place in broad daylight! I am waiting.

Soul , Suffering , Passion , Cry

“There is darkness in light, there is pain in joy, and there are thorns on the rose.”

Cate Tiernan (1961) American novelist

Pain , Light , Joy

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)
Context: The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

Sense , Light

“But I welcome the darkness where the two eyes of that soft panther glow. The darkness is my cultural broth. The enchanted darkness. I go on speaking to you, risking disconnection: I’m subterraneously unattainable because of what I know.”

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) Brazilian writer

Source: The Stream of Life

“What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men. 1
Paradise Lost. Book i. Line 22.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

i.17-26
Paradise Lost (1667)
Context: And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert th' Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.

Men , God , Books , Way

“The bravest person I know is afraid of the dark. She sleeps with a night lamp always, but if her friends are threatened? She suddenly thinks she's a bear twelve feet tall and attacks whoever scared her friends.”

Tamora Pierce book Cold Fire

Source: Cold Fire

Thinking , Sleep , Personality , Night

“If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

As quoted in Bibliotheca Sacra and Theological Review by ? Vol. IV, No. 8 (1847) by Dallas Theological Seminary, p. 107

Life , Death , Light

“The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Depressing , God , Soul , Light

“Remember, darkness does not always equate to evil, just as light does not always bring good.”

P. C. Cast book Betrayed

Source: Betrayed

Light , Evil

“You wish to put me in the dark. I tell you that I will never be put in the dark. You wish to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

Source: The Final Problem and Other Stories

“Being human is a complicated gig. So give that ol' dark night of the soul a hug. Howl the eternal yes!”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Soul , Night

“When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

Life , Light

“The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

Interview on Israeli television, as quoted in "Happy 65th Birthday to Prof. Stephen Hawking!" at StarTrek.com (8 January 2007) http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/news/article/37695.html

World

“Curiosity killed the cat,” Fesgao remarked, his dark eyes unreadable.
Aly rolled her eyes. Why did everyone say that to her? “People always forget the rest of the saying,” she complained. “‘And satisfaction brought it back.”

Tamora Pierce (1954) American writer of fantasy novels for children

Source: Trickster's Choice

People , Cats , Forgetting

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

“That man is such a damn turd monkey."
"Grandma!" I said.
"Oh, Zoeybird, did I call your mother's husband a damn turd monkey out loud?"
"Yes, Grandma, you did."
She looked at me, her dark eyes sparkling. "Good.”

Kristin Cast book Chosen

Source: Chosen

Grandma

“… For a lifetime was but a moment in that place, and each man dreams his own heaven.

And in the darkness David closed his eyes, as all that was lost was found again.”

John Connolly The Book of Lost Things

Source: The Book of Lost Things

Dreams

“Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms: in the dark and based on bullshit.”

Terry Pratchett book Making Money

Source: Making Money

Money

“Weather forecast for tonight: dark.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Weather

“We're all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person's opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn't know”

Virginia Woolf book The Voyage Out

Source: The Voyage Out

Imagination , Thinking , Personality

“Inside that darkness, i saw rain falling on the sea. Rain softly falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it. The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don't know it is raining.”

Haruki Murakami book South of the Border, West of the Sun

Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

Fish , Sea

“I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make
it through one door, I'll go through another door -- or I'll
make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark
the present.”

Joan Rivers (1933–2014) American comedian, actress, and television host

“It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: Wolves of the Calla

Good Night

“Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

Life , Flowers , Tree

“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Source: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

God , Drink , Silence

“I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

World , Dreams , Sleep , Sea

“Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them too-even when you are in the dark. Even when you're falling.”

Morrie Schwartz (1916–1995) American sociologist

People , Feeling

“All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Sense

“Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.”

Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944) French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright

Sadness , Light , Heart

“Sustaining faith is what sets you through those dark nights of the soul when you don’t know where to go or what to do, and it seems that you can’t last another day…but because of your faith in God, you do.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

God , Faith , Soul , Night

“Hades was the personification of dark and dangerous--a living, breathing Batman.”

P. C. Cast (1960) American writer

Source: Goddess of Spring

“I don't recommend shadow travel if you're scared of:
a) The dark
b) Cold shivers up your spine
c) Strange noises
d) Going so fast you feel like your face is peeling off
In other words, I thought it was awesome.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

Travel , Feeling

“We love each other like matches in the dark. We don't talk, we catch fire instead”

Mathias Malzieu book La Mécanique du cœur

Source: La Mécanique du cœur

Love

“We move in and out of darkness and light all our lives. Right now I'm pleased to be in the light.”

Neal Shusterman book Unwind

Source: Unwind

Light

“There's a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milkshake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

Coffee , Thinking

“I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Source: Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Love , Life

“The small wisdom is like water in a glass:
clear, transparent, pure.
The great wisdom is like the water in the sea:
dark, mysterious, impenetrable.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Wisdom , Water , Sea

“Having no other recourse, Roran resorted to the unexpected: he stuck his head and neck out and shouted, "BAH!" just as he would if he were trying to scare someone in a dark hallway…”

Christopher Paolini (1983) American author

“Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Robert E. Howard, (October 4, 1930), https://books.google.com/books?id=rVERL_j9UfcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:0809515679&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-beOVeGqHsi_ggT1vqKgCw&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=insanity&f=true
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Robert E. Howard
Context: It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre 'kick', Here is the material for a really profound study in group neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination.... The very pre-ponderance of passionately pious men in the colony was virtually an assurance of unnatural crime; insomuch as psychology now proves the religious instinct to be a form of transmuted eroticism precisely parallel to the transmutations in other directions which respectively produce such things as sadism, hallucination, melancholia, and other mental morbidities. Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity. This was aggravated, of course, by the Puritan policy of rigorously suppressing all the natural outlets of excuberant feeling--music, laughter, colour, pageantry, and so on. To observe Christmas Day was once a prison offence....

People , Feeling , Strong

“An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.”

James A. Michener book Space

Space (1982)

People , Age , Light

“Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.”

Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient

Source: My Name is Red

Death , Birth , Time

“The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

W.B. Yeats The Second Coming

The Second Coming (1919)
Context: p>Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?</p

Sleep

“A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Nature , Light

“When you come to the edge of all the light you know,
and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown,
FAITH is knowing one of two things will happen:
There will be something solid to stand on
or you will be taught how to fly.”

Barbara Winter (1944)

Faith , Light , Flying

“Life is a message scribbled in the dark.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Life

“Philosophy is written in this grand book, which stands continually open before our eyes (I say the 'Universe'), but can not be understood without first learning to comprehend the language and know the characters as it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is impossible to humanly understand a word; without these one is wandering in a dark labyrinth.”

Galileo Galilei book The Assayer

From Italian: La filosofia è scritta in questo grandissimo libro, che continuamente ci sta aperto innanzi agli occhi (io dico l'Universo), ma non si può intendere, se prima non il sapere a intender la lingua, e conoscer i caratteri ne quali è scritto. Egli è scritto in lingua matematica, e i caratteri son triangoli, cerchi ed altre figure geometriche, senza i quali mezzi è impossibile intenderne umanamente parola; senza questi è un aggirarsi vanamente per un oscuro labirinto.
Other translations:
Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.
The Assayer (1623), as translated by Thomas Salusbury (1661), p. 178, as quoted in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (2003) by Edwin Arthur Burtt, p. 75.
Philosophy is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.
As translated in The Philosophy of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1966) by Richard Henry Popkin, p. 65
Il Saggiatore (1623)
Source: Galilei, Galileo. Il Saggiatore: Nel Quale Con Bilancia Efquifita E Giufta Si Ponderano Le Cofe Contenute Nellalibra Astronomica E Filosofica Di Lotario Sarsi Sigensano, Scritto in Forma Di Lettera All'Illustr. Et Rever. Mons. D. Virginio Cesarini. In Roma: G. Mascardi, 1623. Google Play. Google. Web. 22 Dec. 2015. <https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=-U0ZAAAAYAAJ>.

Books , Mathematics , Understanding , Learning