Darkness Quotes

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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.

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

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.

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

It was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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.

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.

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

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.

Even then take heart! The Lord is certainly nearby. Hold fast to the support of the true living faith. Things will be fine. But it is unbelievable to the poor soul in its tortured state that this unbearable darkness could ever turn into light.

Johannes Tauler

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness
He ruined me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

All at once she could hear the sullen patter of the rain and sense the sigh of the wind behind it. She remembered the sound, because it had rained like that the day Mom was buried, the day they lowered her into that little rectangle of darkness.

Darkness came down on the field and city: and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Each of us, Leonard Read said, must become candles of liberty in the darkness of collectivist ideas. The brighter we each shine through our understanding and ability to articulate the meaning of freedom, the more we will be beacons that can attract others.

Richard Ebeling

Angels are visible to those who accept the light and break the pact made with darkness.

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires, — Necessity and Free Will.

We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path.

Jeanette Winterson

Men are deplorably ignorant with respect to natural things, an modern philosophers, as though dreaming in the darkness, must be aroused and taught the uses of things, the dealing with things; they must be made to quit the sort of learning that comes only from books, and that rests only on vain arguments from probability and upon conjecture.

William Gilbert

Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life's light to be determined by the darkness around me.

Sojourner Truth

In later years, it would become fashionable to say of the missionaries, "They came to the islands to do good, and they did right well." Others made jest of the missionary slogan, "They came to a nation in darkness; they left it in light," by pointing out: "Of course they left Hawaii lighter. They stole every goddamned thing that wasn't nailed down."

James A. Michener

Central depth of purple, Leaves more bright than rose, Who shall tell what brightest thought Out of darkness grows? Who, through what funereal pain, Souls to love and peace attain?

Tonight, I should watch the sun set, and think of the impending darkness as a metaphor for my wasted life: once it was bright, and full of potential, and now it is dark and hopeless and bleak. I should not make the mistake of thinking that the moon and the stars represent slim glimmers of hope, or evidence that there is light on the other side. Even if there is light somewhere I will never walk in it again.

Let us learn to be patient in the days of darkness, if we know anything of vital union with Christ.

Each of us is the forward point of a procession stretching back into the darkness. And even within oneself, every moment is a self that dies: the road to each day's midnight is littered with corpses and all of them whispering.