A Quote by Dante Alighieri

As phantoms frighten beasts when shadows fall.

Dante Alighieri

Quote Topics

Beasts Fall Frighten Phantoms Shadows

Quote Author

Dante Alighieri
Italian - Poet
1265 - 1321

We are but phantoms ... and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries the shadow of its lights.

H. G. Wells

Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they be, cling to life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them individually and make war on them without truce; for it is one of humanity's inevitabilities to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms.

Victor Hugo

What unhappy beings men are! They constantly waver between false hopes and silly fears, and instead of relying on reason they create monsters to frighten themselves with, and phantoms which lead them astray.

Baron de Montesquieu

Yet I pity the poor wretch, though he's my enemy. He's yoked to an evil delusion, but the same fate could be mine. I see clearly: we who live are all phantoms, fleeing shadows.

Sophocles

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

John Irving

Entrepreneurs are different beasts. Beasts who don’t give a damn, who kick ass when required, who stand up to a challenge, and who rise time and again with utter disregard to fear or failure. These are the beasts who run the world.

Vishwas Mudagal

Men are beasts! Nothing more! We fight! We kill! We devour our prey! Beasts do not stand behind beasts, little prince... They use each other so long as it suits their own selfish purpose!

Gangrel

For with him the phantoms of the mind (which to the average man are merely phantoms) projected themselves with a bodily vividness and violence. Not only had they the colour and authority of accomplished fact, they were invested with an immortality denied to facts.

May Sinclair

Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts,--the first and the wisest of beasts, it may be, but still true beasts. We shall only differ in degree and not in kind,--just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts, and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of the soul within us that makes the difference.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There are guerrilla armies that make little boys kill their own families. Such acts rip out the soul and make space for beasts to grow inside. Armies need beasts, don’t they? Pet beasts, to do their terrible work!

Laini Taylor

Illusions are shadows moving endlessly across the ground. The shadows are quite real but they're shadows. They have very little substance.

Frederick Lenz

Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don't they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer.

Ray Bradbury

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.

Gaston Bachelard

A teacher had once told them that men were either beasts, gentlemen, or beasts masquerading as gentlemen. Might there be a fourth category — gentlemen masquerading as beasts?