A Quote by George Saunders

I keep thinking of Robert Stone making the distinction between the word sublime and the word beautiful. He described being in a battle as sublime. Because even though people were dying, it was such a huge sensory experience that it became sublime.

George Saunders

Quote Topics

Battle Beautiful Became Because Being Between Distinction Dying Even Experience Huge Keep Making People Robert Sensory Stone Sublime Thinking Though Were Word

Quote Author

George Saunders
American - Writer
Born: December 2, 1958

What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.

Zadie Smith

Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.

Victor Hugo

Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt

Immanuel Kant

I listen to a lot of Sublime. Dude, I'm obsessed with Sublime. You have no idea.

Behati Prinsloo

Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.

John Ruskin

There's one thing that I like about Rome that was stated by Napoleon: that from sublime to pathetic is only one step away. And in Rome there's a constant shifting between sublime and pathetic.

Paolo Sorrentino

The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.

Thomas Paine

Of all tools, an observatory is the most sublime. . . . What is so good in a college as an observatory? The sublime attaches to the door and to the first stair you ascent, that this is the road to the stars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In all my work there's this notion of the melancholic. You can make a photograph about the sublime, but you can't make the sublime itself.

John Divola

A sublime religion inevitably generates a strong feeling of guilt. There is an unavoidable contrast between loftiness of profession and imperfection of practice. And, as one would expect, the feeling of guilt promotes hate and brazenness. Thus it seems that the more sublime the faith the more virulent the hatred it breeds.

Eric Hoffer

But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.

Leo Tolstoy

There's only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, but there's no road leading from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Lion Feuchtwanger

You do not reach the sublime by degrees; the distance between it and the merely beautiful is infinite.

Madame de Stael

A sublime soul can rise to all kinds of greatness, but by an effort; it can tear itself from all bondage, to all that limits and constrains it, but only by strength of will. Consequently the sublime soul is only free by broken efforts.

Friedrich Schiller

The true Way is sublime. It can't be expressed in language. Of what use are scriptures? But someone who sees his own nature finds the Way, even if he can't read a word.