Quotes
Quotes about Darkness
I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires, Necessity and Freewill.
Or, if there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, Making it momentany as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!' The jaws of darkness do devour it up: So quick bright things come to confusion.
Or, if there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, Making it momentany as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!' The jaws of darkness do devour it up: So quick bright things come to confusion.
The twig is so easily bended I have banished the rule and the rod: I have taught them the goodness of knowledge, They have taught me the goodness of God; My heart is the dungeon of darkness, When I shut them for breaking a rule; My frown is sufficient correction; My love is the law of the school.
It is better to light 1 candle than to curse the darkness.
Stars will blossom in the darkness, Violets bloom beneath the snow.
He calls his wish, it comes; he sends it back, And says he called another; that arrives, Meets the same welcome; yet he still calls on; Till one calls him, who varies not his call, But holds him fast, in chains of darkness bound, Till Nature dies, and judgment sets him free; A freedom far less welcome than this chain.
It was the human spirit itself that failed at Paris. It is no use passing judgments and making scapegoats of this or that individual statesman or group of statesmen. Idealists make a great mistake in not facing the real facts sincerely and resolutely. They believe in the power of the spirit, in the goodness which is at the heart of things, in the triumph which is in store for the great moral ideals of the race. But this great faith only too often leads to an optimism which is sadly and fatally at variance with actual results. It is the realist and not the idealist who is generally justified by events. We forget that the human spirit, the spirit of goodness and truth in the world, is still only an infant crying in the night, and that the struggle with darkness is as yet mostly an unequal struggle. . . . Paris proved this terrible truth once more. It was not Wilson who failed there, but humanity itself. It was not the statesmen that failed, so much as the spirit of the peoples behind them.
There is a Yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale, Which to this day stands single, in the midst Of its own darkness, as it stood of yore.
Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.
