Quotes about glory
page 3

“O, with what freshness, what solemnity and beauty, is each new day born; as if to say to insensate man, "Behold! thou hast one more chance! Strive for immortal glory!" There is no speech nor language where this voice is not heard; but the bold, bad man heard it not. He woke with an oath and a curse. What to him was the gold and purple, the daily miracle of morning!”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

Ch 36 Emmeline and Cassy
Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

Beauty, Chance

“She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Mandarins

Source: The Mandarins

Love, Princess

“He shook my dozing soul and threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror. (on CS Lewis)”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Source: Don't Waste Your Life

Life, God, World, Soul

“No 'Glory shall be your reward' for me. Oh, no, for me, it is, 'Stop whining' and 'Go to bed'.”

Megan Whalen Turner The King of Attolia

Source: The King of Attolia

“Always there is something worth saying
about glory, about gratitude.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: What Do We Know

Gratitude

“But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

Cats, Thinking, Bee

“What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Variant: Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be...
Source: Ode: Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood

Flowers, Grass

“Onward, then! To glory and some such nonsense.”

Brandon Sanderson book Words of Radiance

Source: Words of Radiance

“And I envied her that she had chosen her work herself and was doing what she wanted to do. I don't suppose I had any idea what I 'wanted' and so I was chosen, not choosing. There's glory and honor in being chosen. But not much room for free will.”

Elizabeth Wein book Code Name Verity

Source: Code Name Verity

Idea, Envy

“There we will, I pray, remain and learn and grow until the time when we will rise together to the ultimate heights, changing in appearance but never in devotion, sharing the transcendent glory of our love through all eternity.”

Richard Matheson book What Dreams May Come

Source: What Dreams May Come

Love, Learning, Appearance, Change

“… as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.”

Donna Tartt book The Goldfinch

Source: The Goldfinch

Love, Death

“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.' Whatever happens is to His good purpose and for His glory. I am not afraid.”

Francine Rivers book A Voice in the Wind

Source: A Voice in the Wind

“There is no greater glory than to die for love.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Variant: There's no greater misfortune than dying alone.
Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love

“Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible. We're not giving up. We're waiting for a better opportunity to win.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)

Suicide, Waiting

“My joy grows with every soul that seeks the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Remember, you have one life. That’s all. You were made for
God. Don’t waste it.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Source: Don't Waste Your Life

Life, God, Soul, Joy

“The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Forgiveness

“Where's the glory in repeating what others have done?”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Source: The Lightning Thief

“Irony is the glory of slaves.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

“But to mean it when I say that I want my life to count for His glory is to drive a stake through the heart of self - a painful and determined dying to me that must be a part of every day I live.”

Louie Giglio (1958) American clergy

Life, Pain, Heart, Parting

“The man whose eye is single for the glory of Another can be trusted.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Source: Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot

“… as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

Source: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume I

“Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dreams,
Lover of loneliness, and wandering,
Of upcast eye, and tender pondering!
Thee must I praise above all other glories
That smile us on to tell delightful stories.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

Love, Smile, Dreams, Lovers

“The passion of laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with our own formerly…”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic Pt. I Human Nature (1640) Ch. 9
Source: Leviathan

Laughter, Passion

“When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything.”

Harriet Tubman (1820–1913) African-American abolitionist and humanitarian

Personality

“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”

James Joyce book The Dead

Dubliners (1914)
Variant: One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
Source: "The Dead"

Age, World, Passion

“The sky was a rich, mindless, never-ending blue, like a promise of some ridiculous glory that wasn’t really there.”

Donna Tartt book The Goldfinch

Source: The Goldfinch

“The glory of science is, that it is freeing the soul -- breaking the mental manacles -- getting the brain out of bondage -- giving courage to thought -- filling the world with mercy, justice, and joy.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Source: Humboldt From 'The Gods and Other Lectures'

World, Justice, Soul, Courage

“We breathe, sleep, drink, eat, work and then die! The end of life is death. What do you long for? Love? A few kisses and you will be powerless. Money? What for? To gratify your desires. Glory? What coems after it all? Death! Death alone is certain.”

Guy De Maupassant Bel-Ami

Source: Bel-Ami

Love, Life, Death, Money

“God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

God, Justice, Parting

“there is no glory in punishing”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“We all have our moments of brilliance and glory, and this was mine.”

Roald Dahl book Boy

Source: Boy: Tales of Childhood

“He is her glory. Any woman could say it. For every one of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have been familiar with this feeling, but then, all women are mothers of great men -- it isn't their fault if life disappoints them later.”

Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

Life, Women, Men, God

“Standing there, I loved myself and I hated myself. That's what the black Mary did to me, made me feel my glory and my shame at the same time.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Love, Hate, Feeling, Time

“I shall gain glory or die.”

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer

Source: Beowulf

“Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.”

Jo Walton book Among Others

Source: Among Others

World

“O what a blessed day that will be when I shall… stand on the shore and look back on the raging seas I have safely passed; when I shall review my pains and sorrows, my fears and tears, and possess the glory which was the end of all!”

Richard Baxter (1615–1691) English Puritan church leader, poet, and hymn-writer

Pain, Fear, Tear, Rage

“Grace is the pleasure of God to magnify the worth of God by giving sinners the right and power to delight in God without obscuring the glory of God.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

God, Pleasure

“It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

Travel, Star, Light

“Maybe this are my glory days, and I'm not even realizing it…”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Variant: Maybe these are my glory days, and I'm not ever realizing it because they involve a ball.
Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.”

Philip Pullman book The Amber Spyglass

Source: The Amber Spyglass

God, Religion

“Honor is a fool's prize. Glory is of no use to the dead.”

Drew Karpyshyn book Star Wars: Darth Bane: Path of Destruction

Source: Path of Destruction

Fools, Dead

“The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but we have to be taught, it seems.”

Richard Rohr (1943) American spiritual writer, speaker, teacher, Catholic Franciscan priest

Nature, Light

“You are mine-you know you're mine!" he cried wildly… the moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened… the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“.. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the 'Momentary' masters of a 'Fraction' of a 'Dot”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Thinking

“The sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory well covered by cloud till it seemed there'd be no show at all.”

Clive Barker book Cabal

Source: Cabal

Sun

“If anyone stops us, as long as we mumble something pretentious about the glory of death, we should be fine.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Death

“You love each other – anyone can see that, looking at you – that kind of love that can burn down the world or raise it up in glory.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

Love, World

“A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Books, Beauty, Peaceful

“Name none of the fallen, for they stand in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living.”

Steven Erikson book Deadhouse Gates

Source: Deadhouse Gates

Death, Dead

“Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Education, Nature

“Language has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Source: The Eternal Now

Pain, Solitude, Loneliness

“There’s glory and honour in being chosen. But not much room for free will”

Elizabeth Wein book Code Name Verity

Source: Code Name Verity

“Be mild, and cleave to gentle things,
thy glory and thy happiness be there.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Happiness

“Glory falls around us
as we sob
a dirge of
desolation on the Cross
and hatred is the ballast of
the rock
which lies upon our necks
and underfoot.”

Maya Angelou book Letter to My Daughter

"Glory Falls"
I Shall Not Be Moved (1990)
Source: Letter to My Daughter

“Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

People, World, Beauty, Way

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) Irish physician and writer

Variant: Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Source: The Citizen of the World, Or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to His Friends in the Country, by Dr. Goldsmith

Time, Motivational, Deep, Success

“People weren't firecrackers who burst into the night sky with brilliance and glory, and a moment later faded away to nothing. Our souls had to be more lasting than that.”

Janette Rallison (1966) American writer

Source: Just One Wish

People, Soul, Night

“It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark.”

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer

Source: Beowulf

Death, World, Waiting

“I can awaken things inside you that have been sleeping all your life. You're strong enough to live in the dark, to glory in it. You can become a queen of the shadows. Why not take that power, Elena? Let me help you take it.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: The Awakening / The Struggle

Life, Sleep, Strong, Help

“For glory lit, and life alive, for goals unreached and aims to strive. All men must try, the wind did see. It is the test, it is the dream.”

Brandon Sanderson book Words of Radiance

Source: Words of Radiance

Life, Men, Dreams

“Less than forty-eight hours until G-Day, when Gaea the Princess of Potty Sludge would awaken in all her dirt-faced glory.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Princess

“It is a desirable thing to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.”

Plutarch book Moralia

8
Moralia, Of the Training of Children

“God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

God, Tear, Laughter

“The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Art, Light

“I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly - or ever - gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe”

Brian Greene (1963) American physicist

Star, Sense, Universe, Night

“Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

God, Home, Forgetting

“Glory?…. Glory belongs to God alone.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

God

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Life, Soul, Star, Birth

“age has its own glory, beauty, and wisdom that belong to it.”

Joseph Murphy The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

Source: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

Wisdom, Age, Beauty

“… the kind of love that can burn down the world or raise it up in glory…”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

Love, World

“To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful.. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking”

Agnes de Mille (1905–1993) American dancer and choreographer

Beauty, Dance, Powerful

“That's all the glory my heart is after,
Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I'd rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564)
Context: Readers, friends, if you turn these pages
Put your prejudice aside,
For, really, there's nothing here that's outrageous,
Nothing sick, or bad — or contagious.
Not that I sit here glowing with pride
For my book: all you'll find is laughter:
That's all the glory my heart is after,
Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I'd rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous.

Men, Courage, Laughter, Heart

“We can't look to the world to restore our worth; we're here to restore our worth to the world. The world outside us can reflect our glory, but it cannot create it. It cannot crown us. Only God can crown us, and he already has.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

God, World

“We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey;”

John Hope Franklin (1915–2009) American historian

World, Travel

“Is this really true? If we take an average day in the life of the average man we seem to see very little evidence of concern with the sciences and the arts. The average man gets up, goes to work, eats his meals, reads the newspapers, watches television, goes to the cinema, goes to bed, sleeps, wakes up, starts all over again. Unless we happen to be professional scientists, laboratory experiments and formulae have ceased to have any meaning for most of us; unless we happen to be poets or painters or musicians—or teachers of literature, painting, and music—the arts seem to us to be only the concern of schoolchildren. And yet people have said, and people still say, that the great glories of our civilisation are the scientists and artists. Ancient Greece is remembered because of mathematicians like Euclid and Pythagoras, because of poets like Homer and dramatists like Sophocles. In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Life, People, Age, Art

“Wait,” Foyle commanded. He looked at the beaming grin engraved in the steel robot face. “But society can be so stupid. So confused. You’ve witnessed this conference.”
“Yes, sir, but you must teach, not dictate. You must teach society.”
“To space-jaunte? Why? Why reach out to the stars and galaxies? What for?”
“Because you’re alive, sir. You might as well ask: Why is life? Don’t ask about it. Live it.”
“Quite mad,” Dagenham muttered.
“But fascinating,” Y’ang-Yeovil murmured.
“There’s got to be more to life than just living,” Foyle said to the robot.
“Then find it for yourself, sir. Don’t ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts.”
“Why can’t we all move forward together?”
“Because you’re all different. You’re not lemmings. Some must lead, and hope that the rest will follow.”
“Who leads?”
“The men who must … driven men, compelled men.”
“Freak men.”
“You’re all freaks, sir. But you always have been freaks. Life is a freak. That’s its hope and glory.”
“Thank you very much.”

Alfred Bester book The Stars My Destination

“My pleasure, sir.”
Source: The Stars My Destination (1956), Chapter 16 (p. 251).

Life, Men, Pleasure, Stupidity

“He took his way to the abode of sacred Loyalty, seeking to discover her hidden purpose. It chanced that the goddess, who loves solitude, was then in a distant region of heaven, pondering in her heart the high concerns of the gods. Then he who gave peace to Nemea accosted her thus with reverence: "Goddess more ancient than Jupiter, glory of gods and men, without whom neither sea nor land finds peace, sister of Justice…"”
Ad limina sanctae contendit Fidei secretaque pectora temptat. arcanis dea laeta polo tum forte remoto caelicolum magnas uoluebat conscia curas. quam tali adloquitur Nemeae pacator honore: 'Ante Iouem generata, decus diuumque hominumque, qua sine non tellus pacem, non aequora norunt, iustitiae consors...'

Silius Italicus Punica

Book II, lines 479–486
Punica

Love, Men, God, Peace

“Strength, power, and majesty, belong to man;
They make the glory native to his life;
But sweetness is a woman's attribute —
By that she has reigned, and by that will reign.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette (24th January 1835) Versions from the German (Fourth Series.) 'The Empire of Woman' — Schiller.
Translations, From the German

Life

“Tombed in the solid night of starless space;
From nearest living orb so far removed,
That light, of all material things most swift,
Myriads on myriads of earth's years must speed,
Ere the mere outskirts of that Stygian gloom,
If ever, it might reach,-at rest eterne,
Lies the cold wreck of an extinguished sun.
Prime glory once of all heaven's radiant host;
Body, for soul of purest light most fit-
'Tween its first darkening, and eclipse complete,
Streamed years which might eternity appear;
While into ether, like the particles,
Invisible, which are the breath of flowers,
The mighty bulk its softer elements
Still ever was exhaling. As when flesh
And sinew of earth's monster Mastodon,
By the slow wasting of the elements,
All are dissolved, and hard, enduring bones
Alone remain,- even so, of this immense,-
When, by the ocean waves of centuries,
Millions succeeding millions, worn away,-
The adamantine skeleton alone,
In darkness, silence, utter solitude,
A ruin for eternity, was left.”

Edwin Atherstone (1788–1872) British writer

Israel in Egypt, Book the First (1861)

Soul, Flowers, Solitude, Light

“What is this Hebrew Christ? To me unknown,
His lineage—doctrine—mission—yet how clear,
Is God-like goodness, in his actions shewn!
How straight and stainless is his life's career!
The ray of Deity that rests on him,
In my eyes makes Olympian glory dim.”

Charlotte Brontë book Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell

Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), Pilate's Wife's Dream (1846)

Life, God, Christ

“Only this time it was just a brief rest, till the stars came out. They stared down with mockery in their twinkles, saying all our sweat and blood really had no meaning in the long eye of time. Nothing we did would be recalled a thousand years from now.
Such thoughts infected us all. No one had any ideals or glory-lust left. We just wanted to get somewhere, lie down, and forget the war.
The war would not forget us.”

Glen Cook The Black Company

Source: The Black Company (1984), Chapter 5, “Harden” (p. 140)

War, Lie, Star, Time

“Human learning, with the blessing of God upon it, introduces us to divine wisdom; and while we study the works of nature the God of nature will manifest himself to us; since, to a well-tutored mind, “The heavens,” without a miracle, “declare his glory, and the firmament showeth his handy-work.””

George Horne (1730–1792) English churchman, writer and university administrator

George Horne (bp. of Norwich.) (1799). Discourses on several subjects and occasions. Vol. 1,2, p. 357; As quoted in Allibone (1880)

Wisdom, God, Nature, Study

“The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Source: 1790s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793), Proverbs of Hell, Line 22

Wisdom, God

“Among the friends and patrons of the society at York who paid kind and hospitable attention to those whom the love of science had brought to the meeting, the clergy must not be passed over in silence. They had been the zealous promoters of the meeting; had done much towards facilitating the preliminary arrangements; and exerted themselves by their influence and example to secure to the association that respect and general attention which it deserved, and which at York it amply received. To the church, therefore, the British Association is deeply indebted; and convinced, as I am, that true religion and true science ever lead to the same great end, manifesting and exalting the glory and goodness of the great object of our common worship, I trust that the firmer the association is established, and the more influential it becomes, the more willing and the more efficient an ally it will prove in the cause of religion. While in former times science was said to lead to infidelity, because then it was less profoundly studied, or with less zeal for truth, it is one of the happy characters of the science of this day that it renders men more devout; and it is a pleasing evidence that such is the received opinion, when discerning and educated men — the friends and teachers of religion — of all ranks, step forward not only to patronize science, but to enlist themselves among its cultivators, and to distinguish those who have most successfully advanced it.”

James Finlay Weir Johnston (1796–1855) Scottish agricultural chemist

Report of the First Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at York in September 1831. By James F. W. Johnston, A. M. &c. &c. As found in David Brewster's The Edinburgh Journal Of Science. Vol. 8 https://archive.org/stream/edinburghjourna09brewgoog#page/n29/mode/2up, p. 29.

Love, Men, Happiness, Truth

“They would be our worst enemy who would wish us to live only on the glories of the past and die off from the face of the earth in sheer passivity. By continuous achievement alone we can justify our great ancestry. We do not honour our ancestors by the false claim that they are omniscient and had nothing more to learn.”

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) Bengali polymath, physicist, biologist, botanist and archaeologist

In page=106
Science and National Consciousness in Bengal: 1870-1930

Learning, Past, Falseness

“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

St. 9 <br class="br"> Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (written 1750, publ. 1751)

Beauty, Wealth

“Let us learn wisdom from this illustrious example. We have passed the Red Sea of slaughter; our garments are yet wet with its crimson spray. We have crossed the fearful wilderness of war, and have led our four hundred thousand heroes to sleep beside the dead enemies of the Republic. We have heard the voice of God amid the thunders of battle commanding us to wash our hands of iniquity, to 'proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.' When we spurned his counsels we were defeated, and the gulfs of ruin yawned before us. When we obeyed his voice, he gave us victory. And now at last we have reached the confines of the wilderness. Before us is the land of promise, the land of hope, the land of peace, filled with possibilities of greatness and glory too vast for the grasp of the imagination. Are we worthy to enter it? On what condition may it be ours to enjoy and transmit to our children's children? Let us pause and make deliberate and solemn preparation. Let us, as representatives of the people, whose servants we are, bear in advance the sacred ark of republican liberty, with its tables of the law inscribed with the 'irreversible guaranties' of liberty. Let us here build a monument on which shall be written not only the curses of the law against treason, disloyalty, and oppression, but also an everlasting covenant of peace and blessing with loyalty, liberty, and obedience; and all the people will say, Amen.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1860s, Speech in the House of Representatives (1866)

Wisdom, God, War, Children

“A small but significant number of angry and historically minded women comprehend the women's revolution in the visionary sense of an end to the catastrophic brotherhood and a return to the former glory and wise equanimity of the matriarchies. We don't know how this will take place exactly, nor the resultant nature of the new social forms, we know that it will take place, and in fact that the process of its development is now irreversibly underway. Of supreme importance in this process is the recovery by modern woman of her mythology as models for theory, consciousness, and action…. The Swiss patrician Jacob Bachofen was one of the first to discover "the female era at the lower seam of history, with its sacerdotal, political, and economic female dominion."”

Jill Johnston book Lesbian Nation

…. The fruits of this research were until recently unavailable except to a few initiates and they now form a cornerstone of the second wave in the feminist revolution....
Lesbian Nation (N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 1973 (SBN (not ISBN) 671-21433-0)), pp. 248–249.

Women, History, Nature, Sense

“If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game
If you are the healer, it means I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame

Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning for the help that never came
You want it darker

Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my Lord”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

"You Want It Darker" · Full text online http://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-you-want-it-darker-lyrics · YouTube audio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0nmHymgM7Y <br class="br">You Want It Darker (2016)

Game, Help

“The Intention and the End of Monarchy, is the Glory of the Citizens, of the State, and of the Sovereign.
But, from this Glory, a Sense of Liberty arises in a People governed by a Monarch; which may produce in these States as much Energy in transacting the most important Affairs, and may contribute as much to the Happiness of the Subjects, as even Liberty itself….”

Catherine the Great (1729–1796) Empress of Russia

Proposals for a New Law Code (1768)

Happiness, People, Sense

“They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,
The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.”

A.E. Housman book A Shropshire Lad

No. 23, st. 4.
A Shropshire Lad (1896)

“A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.”

Umberto Eco book The Name of the Rose

The Name of the Rose (1980)

Love, Books, Knowledge

“Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Hope, Spring, Flowers, Drink

“So, my brethren, let us do our work, that others entering on it may carry it forward through after generations. Thus shall the work of the fathers become the glory of fheir children; and in the end, when the mystery of God shall be finished, we shall see, in its completed beauty and proportion, the great fabric into which we put our little all; and we shall rejoice at once in the skill of the Architect and the diligence of the successive builders.”

William Mackergo Taylor (1829–1895) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 126.

God, Children, Beauty, Success

“The gospel and the first church were never hostile to women nor treated them as minors. … When Christianity became a power or authority, this worked against women. A strange perversion, yet fully understandable when we allow that women represent precisely the most innovative elements in Christianity: grace, love, charity, a concern for living creatures, nonviolence, an interest in little things, the hope of new beginnings—the very elements that Christianity was setting aside in favor of glory and success.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), pp. 33-34

Love, Women, Hostility, Hope

“It is the historic glory of the intellectual class of the West in modern times that, of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged, it has shown the largest and most consistent concern for the well-being of the classes which lie below it in the social scale.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 29

Lie, Sense, Time

“Is it wise to say to men of rank and property, who, from old lineage or present possessions have a deep interest in the common weal, that they live indeed in a country where, by the blessings of a free constitution, it is possible for any man, themselves only excepted, by the honest exertions of talents and industry, in the avocations of political life, to make him-self honoured and respected by his countrymen, and to render good service, to the slate; that they alone can never be permitted to enter this career? That they may indeed usefully employ themselves, in the humbler avocations of private life, but that public service they never can perform, public honour they never shall attain? What we have lost by the continuance of this system, it is not for man to know. What we may have lost can more easily be imagined. If it had unfortunately happened that by the circumstances of birth and education, a Nelson, a Wellington, a Burke, a Fox, or a Pitt, had belonged to this class of the community, of what honours and what glory might not the page of British history have been deprived? To what perils and calamities might not this country have been exposed? The question is not whether we would have so large a part of the population Catholic or not. There they are, and we must deal with them as we can. It is in vain to think that by any human pressure, we can stop the spring which gushes from the earth. But it is for us to consider whether we will force it to spend its strength in secret and hidden courses, undermining our fences, and corrupting our soil, or whether we shall, at once, turn the current into the open and spacious channel of honourable and constitutional ambition, converting it into the means of national prosperity and public wealth.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1813/mar/01/mr-grattans-motion-for-a-committee-on in the House of Commons in favour of Catholic Emancipation (1 March 1813). <br class="br">1810s

Life, Men, Secret, Education

“But perhaps the most significant factor in the turn to a Greek ethnicism, which resisted both the Turkish turban and the Latin mitre in the years before the fall of Constantinople, was the opposition of the urban populace, led by the Orthodox party, monks, and priests, to the wealthy urban classes and the Byzantine court. After the Ottoman conquest in 1453, recognition by the Turks of the Greek millet under its Patriarch and Church helped to ensure the persistence of a separate ethnic identity, which, even if it did not produce a ‘precocious nationalism’ among the Greeks, provided the later Greek enlighteners and nationalists with a cultural constituency fed by political dreams and apocalyptic prophecies of the recapture of Constantinople and the restoration of Greek Byzantium and its Orthodox emperor in all his glory.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Chosen Peoples (2003)

Dreams, Help