Pure Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Not secondary to the sun, she gives us his blaze again, Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day... In Heaven queen she is among the spheres; She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure.

Henry David Thoreau

I think of myself as an American artist: I like it here...I feel I represent the U.S. in my art but I'm not a social critic. I just paint those things in my paintings because those things are the things I know best. I'm not trying to criticize the U.S. in any way, not trying to show up any ugliness at all. I'm just a pure artist, I guess. But I can't say if I take myself seriously as an artist. I just hadn't thought about it. I don't know how they consider me in print, though.

Some have asked if the stock of men could not be improved,--if they could not be bred as cattle. Let Love be purified, and all therest will follow. A pure love is thus, indeed, the panacea for all the ills of the world.

Henry David Thoreau

A sky as pure as water bathed the stars and brought them out.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I would have bartered a diamond mine for a glass of pure spring water!

To call a thing good not a day longer than it appears to us good, and above all not a day earlier - that is the only way to keep joy pure.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It was the maxim, I think, of Alphonsus of Aragon, that dead counsellors are safest. The grave puts an end to flattery and artifice, and the information we receive from books is pure from interest, fear, and ambition. Dead counsellors are likewise most instructive, because they are heard with patience and with reverence.

Nature is fair in proportion as the youth is pure. The heavens and the earth are one flower ; the earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla.

Henry David Thoreau

Pure Mathematics is the class of all propositions of the form p implies q, where p and q are propositions containing one or more variables, the same in the two propositions, and neither p nor q contains any constants except logical constants. And logical constants are all notions definable in terms of the following: Implication, the relation of a term to a class of which it is a member, the notion of such that, the notion of relation, and such further notions as may be involved in the general notion of propositions of the above form. In addition to these, mathematics uses a notion which is not a constituent of the propositions which it considers, namely the notion of truth.

Bertrand Russell

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

As being is to becoming, so is pure intellect to opinion. And as intellect is to opinion, so is science to belief.

If we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself.

Poor Desdemona! I am glad thy father's dead.
Thy match was mortal to him, and pure grief
Shore his old thread in twain.

William Shakespeare

Anyone who tells a lie has not a pure heart, and cannot make a good soup.

Ludwig van Beethoven

The jargon makes it seem that … the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin.

Theodor W. Adorno

All of our people all over the country—except the pure-blooded Indians — are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, including even those who came over here on the Mayflower.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

At least wasn't nobody, no outsider, there to hear it so maybe even before next January he was able to believe hadn't none of it even been said, like miracle: what aint believed aint seen. Miracle, pure miracle anyhow, how little a man needs to outlast jest [just] about anything.

William Faulkner

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

How pure are those who have never forced anything open!

The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality, and the preeminence of free government be exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its citizens, and command the respect of the world.

George Washington

His words are bonds, his oaths are oracles; his love sincere, his thoughts immaculate; his tears pure messengers sent from his heart; his heart as far from fraud, as heaven from earth

William Shakespeare

Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all — the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

We placed the wreaths upon the splendid granite sarcophagus, and at its feet, and felt that only the earthly robe we loved so much was there. The pure, tender, loving spirit which loved us so tenderly, is above us - loving us, praying for us, and free from all suffering and woe - yes, that is a comfort, and that first birthday in another world must have been a far brighter one than any in this poor world below!

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