Pure Quotes

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A soul which is conversant with virtue is like an ever flowing source, for it is pure and tranquil and potable and sweet and communicative (social) and rich and harmless and free from mischief.

Aphorisms should be peaks - and those who are addressed, tall and lofty. The air thin and pure, danger near, and the spirit full of gay sarcasm: these go well together.

Friedrich Nietzsche

What church could compete with the fireworks of the pure soul?

The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Do not great crimes and the spirit of pure evil spring out of a fullness of nature ruined by education rather than from any inferiority, whereas weak natures are scarcely capable of any very great good or very great evil?

A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.

If we wish to learn the whole of Arithmetic, Algebra, the Calculus, and indeed all that is usually called pure mathematics (except Geometry), we must start with a dictionary of three words. One symbol stands for zero, another for number, and a third for next after.

Bertrand Russell

I wish I dared dispense with all costume. Naked children are so perfectly pure and lovely; but Mrs. Grundy would be furious - it would never do.

The sun, which passeth through pollutions and itself remains as pure as before.

The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maidens?

[Fantasy is] a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.

J. R. R. Tolkien

So [Polaroid's Dr. Edwin] Land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science, trying to crack the code of color vision. The man is a national treasure. I don't understand why people like that can't be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be — not an astronaut, not a football player — but this.

You lack a foot to travel? Then journey into yourself - that leads to transformation of dust into pure gold.

That a god like Jehovah should have created this world of misery and woe, out of pure caprice, and because he enjoyed doing it, and should then have clapped his hands in praise of his own work, and declared everything to be very good-that will not do at all!

Arthur Schopenhauer

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?

Arthur Schopenhauer

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

Raymond Chandler

A man's social and spiritual discipline must answer to his corporeal. He must lean on a friend who has a hard breast, as he wouldlie on a hard bed. He must drink cold water for his only beverage. So he must not hear sweetened and colored words, but pure and refreshing truths. He must daily bathe in truth cold as spring water, not warmed by the sympathy of friends.

Henry David Thoreau

Whoso is content with pure experience and acts upon it has enough of truth.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will.... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let woman be a plaything, pure and fine, like a precious stone, illumined with the virtues of a world not yet come.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A lady once asked him how he came to define 'pastern', the knee of a horse: instead of making an elaborate defence, as might be expected, he at once answered, "Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance."

No greater mischief can happen to a Christian people, than to have God's word taken from them, or falsified, so that they no longer have it pure and clear. God grant we and our descendants be not witness to such a calamity.

If it is the result of a pure love, there can be nothing sensual in marriage. Chastity is something positive, not negative. It isthe virtue of the married especially. All lusts or base pleasures must give place to loftier delights. They who meet as superior beings cannot perform the deeds of inferior ones.

Henry David Thoreau

Few serve truth in truth because only few have the pure will to be just, and of those again very few have the strength to be just.

Friedrich Nietzsche