Quotes about shadow

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Molloy (1951)
Context: I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows. I was a solid in the midst of other solids.

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss
Context: In the most secret chamber of the spirit of him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, and all unknown to him perhaps, there lurks a shadow, a vague shadow, a shadow of uncertainty, and while he says within himself, "Well, let us live this life that passes away, for there is no other!" the silence of this secret chamber speaks to him and murmurs, "Who knows!... " These voices are like the humming of a mosquito when the south-west wind roars through the trees in the wood; we cannot distinguish this faint humming, yet nevertheless, merged in the clamor of the storm, it reaches the ear.

Letter X
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: To suppose that by our disobedience we have taken something away from God, in the loss of which He suffers, for which He requires satisfaction, and that this satisfaction has been made to Him by the cross sacrifice (as if doing wrong were incurring a debt to Him, which somehow must be paid, though it matters not by whom), is so infinitely derogatory to His majesty, to every idea which I can form of His nature, that to believe it in any such sense as this confounds and overwhelms me. In the strength of my own soul, for myself, at least, I would say boldly, rather let me bear the consequences of my own acts myself, even if it be eternal vengeance, and God requires it, than allow the shadow of my sin to fall upon the innocent.

Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book IV, Lines 659–660 (tr. Allen Mandelbaum)

"The Holy Dimension", p. 337
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Context: Reason is not the measure of all things, not the all-inclusive power in the inner life of man. The powers of will and emotion, the realm of the subconscious lie beyond the scope of knowledge. The rush of reason is an effort of limited strength.
Faith is not the miniature of thinking but its model, not its shadow but its root. It is a spiritual force in man, not dealing with the given, concrete limited, but directed upon the transcendent. It is the spring of our creative actions.

Source: Oresteia (458 BC), Agamemnon, lines 1327–1329 (tr. E. D. A. Morshead)

Lew Fields (1941).
Context: Only in the theatre was it possible to see the performers and to be warmed by their personal charm, to respond to their efforts and to feel their response to the applause and appreciative laughter of the audience. It had an intimate quality; audience and actors conspired to make a little oasis of happiness and mirth within the walls of the theatre. Try as we will, we cannot be intimate with a shadow on a screen, nor a voice from a box.

Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 4 : The Quest for Power, p. 43
Context: While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

Source: How to Become President (1940), Ch. 1 : Government jobs pay big money
Context: As we walk hand in hand through the pathways of knowledge, remember that I am giving you freely and without stint the full accumulation of my two months’ experience as a candidate. I have on file a complete record of everything I’ve said and done. Ever since I threw my hat in the ring I have had myself shadowed, and the results were very entertaining. The things that go on in those back rooms, you wouldn’t believe.
So now we begin our journey together. If you follow these instructions carefully, you will find that every step of your progress, like the path that climbs up and up from the sheltered valley, offers you an ever-wider and more facinating vista, until at last you come out upon the summit of the wrong hill.

Hérodiade.
Hérodiade (1898)
Context: I feel in my sinews
The spreading of shadows
Converging together
With a shiver
And in solitary vigil
After flights triumphal
My head rise
From this scythe
Through a clean rupture
That serves to dissever
The ancient disharmony
With the body
As drunk from fasting
It persists in following
With a haggard bound
Its gaze profound
Up where the frozen
Absolute has chosen
That nothing shall measure
Its vastness, O glacier
But according to a ritual
Illumined by the principle
That chose my consecration
It extends a salutation.

Dr. Malcolm Long, Watchmen #6
Watchmen (1986–1987)
Context: I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to pretend it looked like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn’t. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that is avoiding the real horror. The horror is this: In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else.

an idea, dead or living, sometimes stronger when dead, with rigid, unswerving lines that mark the living embodiment with the stern immobile cast of the non-living. Daily we move among these unyielding shadows, less pierceable, more enduring than granite, with the blackness of ages in them, dominating living, changing bodies, with dead, unchanging souls. And we meet, also, living souls dominating dying bodies — living ideas regnant over decay and death. Do not imagine that I speak of human life alone. The stamp of persistent or of shifting Will is visible in the grass-blade rooted in its clod of earth, as in the gossamer web of being that floats and swims far over our heads in the free world of air.
Regnant ideas, everywhere! Did you ever see a dead vine bloom? I have seen it.
The Dominant Idea (1910)

What Baba Means by Real Work (1954)
Context: The time is very near for the breaking of my silence and then, within a short period all will happen — my humiliation, my glorification, my manifestation, and the dropping of my body. All this will happen soon and within a short period. So, from this moment love me more and more.
Do not propagate what you do not feel. What your heart says and your conscience dictates about me, pour out without hesitation. Be unmindful of whether you are ridiculed or accepted in pouring out your heart for me, or against me, to others.
If you take "Baba" as "God-Incarnate," say so; do not hesitate.
If you think "Baba" is "the devil," say it; do not be afraid.
I am everything that you take me to be, and I am also beyond everything. If your conscience says that "Baba" is the Avatar, say it even if you are stoned for it. But if you feel he is not, then say that you feel "Baba" is not the Avatar. Of myself I say again and again, I am the Ancient One — the Highest of the High.
If you had even the tiniest glimpse of my Divinity, all doubts would vanish and love — Real Love — would be established. Illusion has such a tight grip on you that you forget Reality. Your life is a Shadow. The only Reality is Existence Eternal — which is GOD.

Nurse.
Hérodiade (1898)

"Hate Is Rarely a Personal Matter"
The Best of Sydney J. Harris (1975)
Context: Usually, if we hate, it is the shadow of the person that we hate, rather than the substance. We may hate a person because he reminds us of someone we feared and disliked when younger; or because we see in him some gross caricature of what we find repugnant in ourself; or because he symbolizes an attitude that seems to threaten us.

John The Beloved Disciple In His Old Age: On Jesus The Word
Jesus, The Son of Man (1928)
Context: In every aspect of the day Jesus was aware of the Father. He beheld Him in the clouds and in the shadows of the clouds that pass over the earth. He saw the Father's face reflected in the quiet pools, and the faint print of His feet upon the sand; and He often closed His eyes to gaze into the Holy Eyes.
The night spoke to Him with the voice of the Father, and in solitude He heard the angel of the Lord calling to Him. And when He stilled Himself to sleep He heard the whispering of the heavens in His dreams.
He was often happy with us, and He would call us brothers.
Behold, He who was the first Word called us brothers, though we were but syllables uttered yesterday.

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 8
Context: The Great Monkey closes his eyes, scratches himself again and muses: before the sun has become completely hidden — it is now fleeing amid the tall bamboo trees like an animal pursued by shadows — I shall succeed in reducing this grove of trees to a catalogue. A page of tangled plant calligraphy. A thicket of signs: how to read it, how to clear a path through this denseness? Hanumān smiles with pleasure at the analogy that has just occurred to him: calligraphy and vegetation, a grove of trees and writing, reading and a path. Following a path: reading a stretch of ground, deciphering a fragment of world. Reading considered as a path toward…. The path as a reading: an interpretation of the natural world? He closes his eyes once more and sees himself, in another age, writing (on a piece of paper or on a rock, with a pen or with a chisel?) the act in the Mahanātaka describing his visit to the grove of the palace of Rāvana. He compares its rhetoric to a page of indecipherable calligraphy and thinks: the difference between human writing and divine consists in the fact that the number of signs of the former is limited, whereas that of the latter is infinite; hence the universe is a meaningless text, one which even the gods find illegible. The critique of the universe (and that of the gods) is called grammar…. Disturbed by this strange thought, Hanumān leaps down from the wall, remains for a moment in a squatting position, then stands erect, scrutinizes the four points of the compass, and resolutely makes his way into the thicket.

Part II, section iv, stanza 3
Maud; A Monodrama (1855)

Section 4.22 <!-- p. 246 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: Gregory of Nyssa points out that Moses's vision of God began with the light, with the visible burning bush, the bush which was bright with fire and was not consumed; but afterwards, God spoke to him in a cloud. After the glory which could be seen with human eyes, he began to see the glory which is beyond and after light.
The shadows are deepening all around us. Now is the time when we must begin to see our world and ourselves in a different way.

Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Concluding Remarks
Context: The author hopes she has done justice to that nobility, generosity, and humanity, which in many cases characterize individuals at the South. Such instances save us from utter despair of our kind. But, she asks any person, who knows the world, are such characters common, anywhere?
For many years of her life, the author avoided all reading upon or allusion to the subject of slavery, considering it as too painful to be inquired into, and one which advancing light and civilization would certainly live down. But, since the legislative act of 1850, when she heard, with perfect surprise and consternation, Christian and humane people actually recommending the remanding escaped fugitives into slavery, as a duty binding on good citizens, — when she heard, on all hands, from kind, compassionate and estimable people, in the free states of the North, deliberations and discussions as to what Christian duty could be on this head, — she could only think, These men and Christians cannot know what slavery is; if they did, such a question could never be open for discussion. And from this arose a desire to exhibit it in a living dramatic reality. She has endeavored to show it fairly, in its best and its worst phases. In its best aspect, she has, perhaps, been successful; but, oh! who shall say what yet remains untold in that valley and shadow of death, that lies the other side?

Act I
Buchanan Dying (1974)
Context: Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

The Future of Civilization (1938)
Context: During all the period before 1914, Europe and, in a degree, the whole world lived under the perpetual shadow of war, as we are doing, I am afraid, at the present time. No doubt after it had been going on for a certain time, people became callous. They thought war had been so often avoided that it would continue to be avoided. But nevertheless, all international policy was carried on on the basis that sooner or later war might and probably would have to be faced. This has again become true, and it casts its shadow over every form of human activity. The civil life of every nation is deformed and weakened and obstructed by this threat of war. We are wasting gigantic sums, sums far greater than we have ever wasted before, on preparations for war, because war has again become a very present possibility and, at the same time, its horrors and dangers are enormously greater than they were before 1914.

As translated in Masnavi I Ma'navi : The Spiritual Couplets of Maulána Jalálu-'d-Dín Muhammad Rúmí (1898) edited by Edward Henry Whinfield Book IV, Story IV : "Bayazid and his impious sayings when beside himself" <!-- also quoted in The Perennial Philosophy (1945) by Aldous Huxley -->

If Only We Have Love (1957)
Context: If we only have love
We can melt all the guns
And then give the new world
To our daughters and sons. If we only have love
Then Jerusalem stands
And then death has no shadow
There are no foreign lands.

"Church Not Made With Hands"
A Pagan Place (1984)
Context: She is everywhere and noplace
Like a breath or like a wind
she moves among men
They would seek to hold her as a prize
But she is in the shadows,
the ocean and the sand
She is everywhere and noplace,
Her church not made with handsUncontained by man.

By Still Waters (1906)
Context: We cannot for forgetfulness forego the reverence due to them
Who wear at times they do not guess the sceptre and the diadem.
As bright a crown as this was theirs when first they from the Father sped;
Yet look with deeper eyes and still the ancient beauty is not dead.
He mingled with the multitude. I saw their brows were crowned and bright,
A light around the shadowy heads, a shadow round the head of light.

1960s, I Have A Dream (1963)
Context: Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.
One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.

"Synchronicity II"
Synchronicity (1983)
Context: Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance
He knows that something somewhere has to break
He sees the family home now, looming in his headlights
The pain upstairs that makes his eyeballs ache
Many miles away there's a shadow on the door
Of a cottage on the shore
Of a dark Scottish lake

Source: Beatrice & Virgil (2010), p. 103
Context: To my mind, faith is like being in the sun. When you are in the sun, can you avoid creating a shadow? Can you shake that area of darkness that clings to you, always shaped like you, as if constantly to remind you of yourself? You can't. This shadow is doubt. And it goes wherever you go as long as you stay in the sun. And who wouldn't want to be in the sun?

Introduction
The Nature of the Physical World (1928)
Context: In physics we have outgrown archer and apple-pie definitions of the fundamental symbols. To a request to explain what an electron really is supposed to be we can only answer, "It is part of the A B C of physics".
The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions. Later perhaps we may inquire whether in our zeal to cut out all that is unreal we may not have used the knife too ruthlessly. Perhaps, indeed, reality is a child which cannot survive without its nurse illusion. But if so, that is of little concern to the scientist, who has good and sufficient reasons for pursuing his investigations in the world of shadows and is content to leave to the philosopher the determination of its exact status in regard to reality. In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose — and, alas, suffering and evil.
The frank realisation that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.

The Dog and the Shadow.

September 2007 interview, promoting Cassandra's Dreams http://www.film.com/play/cassandrasdreamwoodyalleninterview/16265462.
Context: I have no apprehension whatsoever. I've been through this so many times. And I found that one way or the other, your life doesn't change at all. Which is sad, in a way. Because the people love your film... nothing great happens. And people hate your film... nothing terrible happens. Many years ago, I would... I would... a film of mine would open, and it would get great reviews, and I would go down and look at the movie theater. There'd be a line around the block. And when a film is reviled, you open a film and people say "Oh, it's the stupidest thing, it's the worst movie." You think: oh, nobody's going to ever speak to you again. But, it doesn't happen. Nobody cares. You know, they read it and they say "Oh, they hated your film." You care, at the time. But they don't. Nobody else cares. They're not interested. They've got their own lives, and their own problems, and their own shadows on their lungs, and their x-rays. And, you know, they've got their own stuff they're dealing with.... So, I'm just never nervous about it.

Presidency (1977–1981), Farewell Address (1981)
Context: Nuclear weapons are an expression of one side of our human character. But there is another side. The same rocket technology that delivers nuclear warheads has also taken us peacefully into space. From that perspective, we see our Earth as it really is — a small and fragile and beautiful blue globe, the only home we have. We see no barriers of race or religion or country. We see the essential unity of our species and our planet; and with faith and common sense, that bright vision will ultimately prevail.
Another major challenge, therefore, is to protect the quality of this world within which we live. The shadows that fail across the future are cast not only by the kinds of weapons we have built, but by the kind of world we will either nourish or neglect.

" Oenone http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/britlit/tenn/oenone.html", st. 3 (1832)

In a performance during "Beatle Week" in Liverpool (27 August 2006), Donovan sang lyrics he declared that George Harrison had improvised for "Hurdy Gurdy Man":
Hurdy Gurdy Man (1967)
Context: Histories of ages past
Unenlightened shadows cast.
Down through all eternity
The crying of humanity.
'Tis then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man
Comes singing songs of love...

A Door in the Hive (1989), Flickering Mind
Context: You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadow.
You the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain's heart
the sapphire I know is there?

But a no-one with a crown of light about his head. He would remember a verse from Pindar: "Man is a dream about a shadow. But when some splendour falls upon him from God, a glory comes to him and his life is sweet."
Neb [No-one] (1985)

The Rubaiyat (1120)
Context: We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show;

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Poem without a Hero (1963)
Context: Dread. Bottomless dread...
I am that shadow on the threshold
defending my remnant peace.

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 8
Context: Gossip, public, private, social — to fight against it either by word or pen seems, after all, like fighting with shadows. Everybody laughs at it, protests against it, blames and despises it; yet everybody does it, or at least encourages others in it: quite innocently, unconsciously, in such a small, harmless fashion — yet we do it. We must talk about something, and it is not all of us who can find a rational topic of conversation, or discuss it when found.

Among the things (2012), Page 86, verse I-II.

Notes: Originally written in English. „Sinn”: In Gaelic means "We". Poem was created in response to an appeal of fellow Irishman, who ask to wrote something in kind of Arthur O'Shaughnessy's "Ode", maintaining similar styling. (footnote from page 42)

Among the things (2012), Page 42, verse I-III.

Inside the Spaceships

"The Chances of Death" (1895)

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Balsamo the Magician (or The Memoirs of a Physician) by Alex. Dumas (1891)

Source: The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Chapter 4, "Conjuring in the Iron Tower"

Beloved (1987)

The Pale King (2011)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Derivation of the Nature of Living Beings, pp. 176–177

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, p. 133

Tears and Saints (1937)

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section V On The Method Respecting The Sensuous And The Intellectual In Metaphysics

"Why Liberty?”, in the Chicago Tribune (30 January 1927)
1920s

(9 January 2019) https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1083199262081642497
Twitter account, January 2019

But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to.
Introduction
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

"The core of the teachings (1980) http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/about-krishnamurti/dissolution-speech.php
1980s

"Industrial Unionism" (1905), Eugene Debs Speaks

Speech in Cambridge (1 May 1926) on the General Strike, quoted in The Times (3 May 1926), p. 9
Later life

Source: Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the ‘Free Left’ and the ‘Statist Left', (2019), p. 452

Source: Natural Right and History (1953), p. 42

As quoted in Humanimal (2010) by Vergil Z. Ozeca, p. 172

So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to a master — so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil — so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best regulated administration of slavery.
Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Ch. 1.

[Jeremy Scahill Testifies Before Congress on America's Secret Wars, The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/blog/156977/jeremy-scahill-testifies-congress-americas-secret-wars#, December 9, 2010, January 2, 2013]

Vitruvius, De Architectura, Book 1, Chap 6, Sec. 9; as translated in Morris Hicky Morgan (trans.), Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture (1914), 27-28.
About

Chap. 9 : Confront Your Dark Side
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

1900s, God Does Not Exist (1904)

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

The Hollow Men (1925)
Variant: Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow.

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 25 et seq.

spirituality and wisdom

Welcome to the Standard Nightmare (p. 102)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

The Century Vol. 44, Issue 4 (August 1892)
Tears (1892)

The Forgetfulness of India. Quoted in Gautier, Francois Arise again, 6 India! Har-Anand Publication 2000 p.22 Quoted from Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Tribute_to_Hinduism.html?id=G3AMAQAAMAAJ

Exclusive Interview With “Super 8” And “The Kissing Booth” Star Joel Courtney https://daman.co.id/exclusive-interview-with-super-8-and-the-kissing-booth-star-joel-courtney/ (June 6, 2011)

Source: The Net of Faith (c. 1443), Chapter 92, Interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:1-3 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Timothy%202:1-3&version=NIV There Can Be No Christian Sovereignty

9 March 2018 https://www.net-a-porter.com/en-gb/porter/article-33a55e73f6c7ac7b/cover-stories/cover-stories/lisa-bonet?cm_mmc=Twitter-_-Magazine-_-20180309&utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral&siteID=TnL5HPStwNw-I7e_rfvO9ni1Csr6IiWfpw&Skimlinks.com=Skimlinks.com interview regarding Bill Cosby

Source: Men, Women and STEM: Why the Differences and What Should be Done? (with Lewis G. Halsey; 2021), p. 22

David Trimble in: Peace 1996-2000 http://books.google.com/books?id=zCmliED4M_UC&pg=PA114, World Scientific, 2005, p. 114

Source: The Poetry of Menotti Lerro, p. 40

From The Poetry of Menotti Lerro, p. 37

Donna Giovanna, Act I, scene ii.
Theater Quotes

Think and Grow Rich (1938)

Source: "President: Empowered People Create a Powerful Mongolia" in IPI https://www.ipinst.org/2013/09/president-empowered-people-create-a-powerful-mongolia (25 September 2013)

Source: BBC Documentary based on Adam Hochschild's 'King Leopold's Ghost'
Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death

Source: Sprawl trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Chapter 37, "Cranes"

Source: "Still Life", The House on Marshland (1975)

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay: From Bankim's novel Krishnakanta's Will. Quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 114-115

Ron English's Fauxlosophy: Volume 2 (2022)

Source: [2011-06-22, Янукович обмовився, пообіцявши "уможливити нові трагедії", https://tsn.ua/video/video-novini/yanukovich-obmovivsya-poobicyavshi-umozhliviti-novi-tragediyi.html, 2022-06-12, ТСН.ua, uk]

Source: Red Mars (1992), Chapter 7, “Senzeni Na” (p. 526)

A Visitor
Song lyrics, Little Stevie Orbit (1980)

Eumeswil (1977)