Quotes about lighting page 2
J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker
Source: J.M.W. Turner
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926–2004) American psychiatrist
As quoted in The Leader's Digest : Timeless Principles for Team and Organization (2003) by Jim Clemmer, p. 84
Dean Koontz book One Door Away from Heaven
Source: One Door Away from Heaven (2001), chapter 73, pp. 604, 605
Context: What will you find behind the door that is one door away from Heaven? […] If your heart is closed, then you will find behind that door nothing to light your way. But if your heart is open, you will find behind that door people who, like you, are searching, and you will find the right door together with them. None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another's salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light.
Douglas Adams book Mostly Harmless
Variant: Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Source: Mostly Harmless
“But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”
William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet
Romeo, Act II, scene ii.
Variant: What light through yonder window breaks?
Source: Romeo and Juliet (1595)
“Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.”
William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads
The Tables Turned, st. 4 (1798).
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)
Jeff Buckley (1966–1997) American singer, guitarist and songwriter
From Grace EPK (Electronic Press Kit)
Solomon (-990–-931 BC) king of Israel and the son of David
Ecclesiastes 8:1-4 http://www.jw.org/en/publications/bible/nwt/books/ecclesiastes/8/, NWT
Dante Alighieri book Purgatorio
Canto VI, lines 43–46 (tr. Carlyle-Wicksteed).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio
Anton LaVey book The Satanic Bible
As quoted in the Introduction by Burton H. Wolfe
The Satanic Bible (1969)
Ronald H. Coase (1910–2013) British economist and author
1990s and later, "The Institutional Structure of Production" (1992)
Dante Alighieri book Inferno
Canto V, lines 28–30 (tr. Charles S. Singleton).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Inferno
“Shadow is the diminution alike of light and of darkness, and stands between darkness and light.”
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), III Six books on Light and Shade
Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 220
José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist
Toast to the artists Juan Luna and Felix Hidalgo: Madrid, Spain (25 June 1884)
Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) Catholic saint and founder of the Franciscan Order
Disputed, Preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words.
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 166.
François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) French writer, politician, diplomat and historian
Aussitôt qu'une pensée vraie est entrée dans notre esprit, elle jette une lumière qui nous fait voir une foule d'autres objets que nous n'apercevions pas auparavant.
As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tyron Edwards.
“Into the half light and shadow go I. Within my head”
Jibanananda Das (1899–1954) Bengali poet, writer, novelist and essayist
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching
Corot's description of the beginning of a day in Switzerland, Château de Gruyères, 1857; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963
1850s
Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) British politician; founder of the British Union of Fascists
'Comrades in Struggle' (June 1938).
“Time is the wisest of all things that are; for it brings everything to light.”
Thales (-624–-547 BC) ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician
As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, I, 35
Sia (musician) (1975) Australian singer
She Wolf (Falling to Pieces), Nothing But the Beat 2.0 (2012). Cowritten with David Guetta, Chris Braide and Giorgio Tuinfort.
Songs
Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) Italian composer
Si rinunci per moda, per smania di novità, per affettazione di scienza, si rinneghi l'arte nostra, il nostro istinto, quel nostro fare sicuro spontaneo naturale sensibile abbagliante di luce, è assurdo e stupido.
Letter to Clarina Maffei, April 20, 1878, cited from Franco Abbiati Giuseppe Verdi (Milano: Ricordi, 1959) vol. 4, p. 79; translation from Franz Werfel and Paul Stefan (eds.), Edward Downes (trans.) Verdi: The Man in His Letters (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1942) p. 345.
“A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Dejection: An Ode
St. 4
Dejection: An Ode (1802)
Isaac Newton book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Preface, translation in William Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences http://books.google.com/books?id=vlQEAAAAQAAJ (1837) <br class="br">Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)
Le Corbusier (1887–1965) architect, designer, urbanist, and writer
The New York Times [obituary] (1965-08-28)
Attributed from posthumous publications
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
“For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things that children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true. This terror, therefore, and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of daylight, but by the aspect and law of nature.”
Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia caecis
in tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemus
interdum, nilo quae sunt metuenda magis quam
quae pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura.
hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
discutiant sed naturae species ratioque.
Lucretius (-94–-55 BC) Roman poet and philosopher
Book II, lines 55–61 (tr. Rouse)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV
Context: Once, bowed in the evening light, the dead man had said, "After my death, life will continue. Every detail in the world will continue to occupy the same place quietly. All the traces of my passing will die little by little, and the void I leave behind will be filled once more."
He was mistaken in saying so. He carried all the truth with him. Yet we, we saw him die. He was dead for us, but not for himself. I feel there is a fearfully difficult truth here which we must get, a formidable contradiction. But I hold on to the two ends of it, groping to find out what formless language will translate it. Something like this: "Every human being is the whole truth." I return to what I heard. We do not die since we are alone. It is the others who die. And this sentence, which comes to my lips tremulously, at once baleful and beaming with light, announces that death is a false god.
Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist
Song lyrics, Death is Not the End
James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)
They may be considered as making a part, though a degraded part, of the families to which they belong. <br class="br"> Speech in the Virginia State Convention of 1829-1830, on the Question of the Ratio of Representation in the two Branches of the Legislature (2 December 1829) http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/quotes/slavery.html <br class="br">1820s
Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter
"Love Itself"
Ten New Songs (2001)
Context: p>The light came through the window,
Straight from the sun above,
And so inside my little room
There plunged the rays of Love.In streams of light I clearly saw
The dust you seldom see,
Out of which the Nameless makes
A Name for one like me.</p
Francis William Bourdillon (1852–1921) British poet
"Light" (popularly known as "The Night has a Thousand Eyes"), published in The Spectator (October 1873).
Context: p>The Night has a thousand eyes,
And the Day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.</p
“He brings hidden things out of the light of his own being into the light of ours.”
George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist
Source: Paul Faber, Surgeon (1879), Ch. 31 : A Conscience
Context: God hides nothing. His very work from the beginning is revelation, — a casting aside of veil after veil, a showing unto men of truth after truth. On and on, from fact to fact divine he advances, until at length in his Son Jesus he unveils his very face. Then begins a fresh unveiling, for the very work of the Father is the work the Son himself has to do, — to reveal. His life was the unveiling of himself, and the unveiling of the Son is still going on, and is that for the sake of which the world exists. When he is unveiled, that is, when we know the Son, we shall know the Father also. The whole of creation, its growth, its history, the gathering total of human existence, is an unveiling of the Father. He is the life, the eternal life, the Only. I see it — ah! believe me — I see it as I cannot say it. From month to month it grows upon me. The lovely home-light, the one essence of peaceful being, is God himself.
He loves light and not darkness, therefore shines, therefore reveals. True, there are infinite gulfs in him, into which our small vision cannot pierce, but they are gulfs of light, and the truths there are invisible only through excess of their own clarity. There is a darkness that comes of effulgence, and the most veiling of all veils is the light. That for which the eye exists is light, but through light no human eye can pierce. — I find myself beyond my depth. I am ever beyond my depth, afloat in an infinite sea; but the depth of the sea knows me, for the ocean of my being is God. — What I would say is this, that the light is not blinding because God would hide, but because the truth is too glorious for our vision. The effulgence of himself God veiled that he might unveil it — in his Son. Inter-universal spaces, icons, eternities — what word of vastness you can find or choose — take unfathomable darkness itself, if you will, to express the infinitude of God, that original splendor existing only to the consciousness of God himself — I say he hides it not, but is revealing it ever, for ever, at all cost of labor, yea of pain to himself. His whole creation is a sacrificing of himself to the being and well-being of his little ones, that, being wrought out at last into partakers of his divine nature, that nature may be revealed in them to their divinest bliss. He brings hidden things out of the light of his own being into the light of ours.
But see how different we are, — until we learn of him! See the tendency of man to conceal his treasures, to claim even truth as his own by discovery, to hide it and be proud of it, gloating over that which he thinks he has in himself, instead of groaning after the infinite of God! We would be forever heaping together possessions, dragging things into the cave of our finitude, our individual self, not perceiving that the things which pass that dreariest of doors, whatever they may have been, are thenceforth "but straws, small sticks, and dust of the floor." When a man would have a truth in thither as if it were of private interpretation, he drags in only the bag which the truth, remaining outside, has burst and left.
Joan of Arc (1412–1431) French folk heroine and Roman Catholic saint
Third public examination (24 February 1431) http://www.stjoan-center.com/Trials/sec03.html; part of this testimony has sometimes been paraphrased: If I am not in the state of grace, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me. <br class="br">Trial records (1431) <br class="br">Context: The light comes at the same time as the Voice. … I will not tell you all; I have not leave; my oath does not touch on that. My Voice is good and to be honored. I am not bound to answer you about it. I request that the points on which I do not now answer may be given me in writing. … You shall not know yet. There is a saying among children, that 'Sometimes one is hanged for speaking the truth.'" [She is asked : Do you know if you are in the grace of God? ] If I am not, may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest in all the world if I knew that I were not in the grace of God. But if I were in a state of sin, do you think the Voice would come to me? I would that every one could hear the Voice as I hear it.
Paul Twitchell (1909–1971) American writer
Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968) Soviet pilot and cosmonaut, the first human in space
Statement of April 1961, as quoted in Warrior of Light : The Life of Nicholas Roerich : Artist, Himalayan explorer and visionary (2002) by Colleen Messina, p. 46
Tatian (120–180) Syrian writer
Source: Address to the Greeks, Chapter XIII
“There is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.”
Amanda Gorman (1998) American poet and activist
Source: Poem The Hill We Climb (recited during the inauguration of the American president Joea Bidena)
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister
Source: Letter to Isaac Disraeli (c. 8 September 1826), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume. I. 1804–1859 (1929), p. 108
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister
Source: Letter to Isaac Disraeli (September 1826), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (1929), p. 107
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister
Source: Diary entry while in Aix (c. 16 August 1824), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (1929), pp. 52-53
“Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.”
Le Corbusier (1887–1965) architect, designer, urbanist, and writer
Vers une architecture [Towards an Architecture] (1923)
Context: Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of these is distinct and tangible within us without ambiguity. It is for this reason that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms. Everybody is agreed to that, the child, the savage and the metaphysician.
Henry Beston book Northern Farm
Source: Northern Farm
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer
"Mindful"
Why I Wake Early (2004)
“The light is too painful for someone who wants to remain in darkness.”
Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer
Source: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
“[A] person whose head is bowed and whose eyes are heavy cannot look at the light.”
Christine de Pizan (1365–1430) Italian French late medieval author
Source: Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc
Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) Russian and American poet and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate
Quoted in: Drusilla Modjeska, Beth Yahp (1995) Picador New Writing. Vol. 3-4, p. 13
“Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.”
Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author
Variant: It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
Source: Men at Arms: The Play
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)
As quoted by Thomas A. Bruno in Take your dreams and Run (South Plainfield: Bridge, 1984), p. 2-3. Source: Dr. Preston Williams (2002): By the Way - A Snapshot Diagnosis of the Inner-City Dilemma, p. 38-39. Xulun Press, Fairfax, Virginia http://books.google.de/books?id=Xn9jxqatFecC&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=woodrow+wilson+We+Grow+Great+By+Dreams%27&source=bl&ots=TtioQ-yO0-&sig=qHWPj4-8g3hSjcV-qJTbzNg6nuI&hl=de&sa=X&ei=1QZ0U4DBOaf80QWSqYDQAw&ved=0CHYQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=woodrow%20wilson%20We%20Grow%20Great%20By%20Dreams'&f=false <br class="br">1880s
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer
Source: Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays
John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher
Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
“Why should we rise because 'tis light?
Did we lie down because t'was night?”
William Shakespeare book Shakespeare's Sonnets
Source: Shakespeare's Sonnets
Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind
Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 86, “The Fire Itself” (pp. 672-673)
“Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.”
May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
Reported as an inscription quoting Lincoln in an English college in The Baptist Teacher for Sunday-school Workers : Vol. 36 (August 1905), p. 483. The portion beginning with "stand with anybody..." is from the 16 October 1854 Peoria speech..
Posthumous attributions
“There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion”
C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology
“maybe death
isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer
Source: Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays