A Quote by Victor Hugo

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

Victor Hugo

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Beautiful Contrast Even Everything Little Need Presents Rest Scarcely Sublime

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Victor Hugo
French - Novelist
February 26, 1802 - May 22, 1885

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

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

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

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

The beautiful must ever rest in the arms of the sublime. The gentle needs the strong to sustain it, as much as the rock-flowers need rocks to grow on, or the ivy the rugged wall which it embraces.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.

Mikhail Bakunin

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

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

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.

Victor Hugo

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

Nature-the sublime, the harsh, and the beautiful-offers something that the street or gated community or computer game cannot. Nature presents the young with something so much greater than they are; it offers an environment where they can easily contemplate infinity and eternity.

Richard Louv

We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew… Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful... and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.

Desmond Tutu

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

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

A Quote by Victor Hugo

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