Darkness Quotes

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It would not take a monster to destroy a monster - but light, light to drive out darkness.

In the darkness, who would answer for the color of a rose,
Or the vestments of the May moth and the pilgrimage it goes?

That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Dare we face the question of just how much of the darkness around us is of our own making?

Betty MacDonald

A sea captain when he stands upon the bridge, or looks out from his deck-house, thinks much about God and about the world. Away in the valley yonder among the corn and the poppies men may well forget all things except the warmth of the sun upon the face, and the kind shadow under the hedge; but he who journeys through storm and darkness must needs think and think.

William Butler Yeats

The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes — openly bad and secretly bad.

Henry Ward Beecher

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

If you are really anxious to learn the way to God, He has not left Himself without a witness, nor you without a teacher. Go to the recorded Christ, and look at that history; listen to those words which survive in the Gospels. And go to the living Christ, to Him who has said, "lam the Light of the world, he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." And dim as may be your outset — more of night than morning in your twilight, as you follow on you shall know the Lord, and with the light that radiates from Himself, your path will shine brighter and brighter unto the perfect day.

My heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain... to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.

I come from all places
and to all places I go:
I am art among the arts
and mountain among mountains.

I know the strange names
of flowers and herbs
and of fatal deceptions
and magnificent griefs.

In night's darkness I've seen
raining down on my head
pure flames, flashing rays
of beauty divine.

What's encouraging about meditation is that, even if we shut down, we can no longer shut down in ignorance. We see very clearly that we're closing off. That in itself begins to illuminate the darkness of ignorance.

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

I believe that brutality tends to defeat itself. Prizefighters die young, gourmands get the gout, hate hurts worse the man who nurses it, and all selfishness robs the mind of its divine insight, and cheats the soul that would know. Mind alone is eternal. He, watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps. My faith is great: out of the transient darkness of the present the shadows will flee away, and Day will yet dawn. I am an Anarchist.

The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and above itself. But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it.

It may be the fate of the universe to spend an eternity in darkness, save one brief flash of self-awareness in the middle of nowhere.

Steve Stewart-Williams

What I would like to emanate from the darkness of this tragedy is one spark of life. I mean, the realization that crime does not begin when you murder people. Crime begins with propaganda, even if such propaganda is for a good cause. The moment propaganda turns against another nation or against any human being, evil starts. Whereas the Germans started propaganda toward the end of this tragedy, you Allies stand at the beginning of the tragedy.

How strangely is antiquity treated! To answer some purposes it is spoken of as the times of darkness and ignorance, and to answer others, it is put for the light of the world.

It was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

O Nation, collect your compassion. Weep! For one of your shining lights is entombed in darkness. Weep! O ye officers and soldiers, whom he loved and led to military glory. Weep! O ye farmers and ye Poor, for your improver and benefactor has become a prey to worms. Come water his tomb with your tears.

James Morris III

Eternity, thou pleasing dreadful Thought!
Thro' what variety of untry'd beings,
Thro' what new scenes and changes must we pass?
The wide, the unbounded Prospect lies before me;
But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it.

But there are others of my kind...those who see themselves as lions among sheep. As kings—superior to man in every way. Why, then, should they be confined to darkness? Why should they fear man?

Seth Grahame-Smith

Just as a lamp waved in darkness creates a figure of light in the air, which remains for as long as the lamp repeats its motion exactly, so the universe retains its shape by repetition: the universe is Time's body. And how will we perceive this body? And how operate on it? Not by the means we perceive extension, relation, color, form — the qualities of Space. … No: but by the means we perceive duration and repetition and change: by Memory.

The deeps are cold:
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold:
Nothing touches but, clutching, devours.

Here where I lie is the hot pit
Crowding on the mind with coal
And the will turned against it
Only drills new seams of darkness
Through the dark-surrounding whole.
Our vivid suns of happiness
Withered from summer, drop their flowers;
Hands of the longed, withheld tomorrow
Fold on the hands of yesterday
In double sorrow.

Stephen Spender