Dark Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

L. Frank Baum

Thomas Hobbes

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Groucho Marx

Rabindranath Tagore

Marie Curie

Gail Godwin

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities.

I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory.

Instructions regarding a proposed gift of a wedding dress for her marriage to Pierre in July 1895

Now I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

Last words

Faith is the bird that feels the light
and sings when the dawn is still dark.

Rabindranath Tagore

No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.

I don't really believe in evil at all. I mean, I don't believe in God. I certainly don't, therefore, believe in some sort of supernatural or trans-historical force that somehow organizes life on dark or black principles. I think there are only people behaving, and sometimes behaving monstrously.

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Ah, Hope! What would life be, stripped of thy encouraging smiles, that teach us to look behind the dark clouds of to-day, for the golden beams that are to gild the morrow.

It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened — an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness. There had never been anything in this place, nor was anything ever intended to occupy this place...

Clifford D. Simak

The sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble...

Wassily Kandinsky

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.

Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.

I don't know in the world why anyone would consent to be a king, and never to be left to himself, but to be worried and wearied and interfered with from dark to daybreak and from morning to the fall of night.

Augusta, Lady Gregory

Love is like the wild rose-briar;
Friendship like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?

Care-Charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my languish, and restore the light;
With dark forgetting of my care return.
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill adventured youth

It is so much easier to tell intimate things in the dark.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H. P. Lovecraft

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.

Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners, where troubles fester; and the whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

Sydney J. Harris

Wit is the only wall
Between us and the dark.

Still falls the Rain —
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss —
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.

The artistic temperament... sometimes seems to me to be a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling, and when the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

Madeleine L'Engle

I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days, and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are, the signposts are there, waiting for us to translate them. Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.