All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.
Look on light and consider its beauty. Shut your {24} eyes, and look again: that which you see was not there before, and that which was, no longer is. Who is he who remakes it if the producer is continually dying?
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
Virtue could see to do what virtue would By her own radiant light, though sun and moon Were in the flat sea sunk. And Wisdom's self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where with her best nurse Contemplation She plumes her feathers and lets grow her wings, That in the various bustle of resort Were all-to ruffled, and sometimes impair'd. He that has light within his own clear breast May sit i' th' centre and enjoy bright day; But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts Benighted walks under the midday sun.
Metaphorically, Tom said, if you take knowledge as light, and ignorance as dark, there does sometimes seem to be a real presence to the dark -- to ignorance. Something more tactile and muscley than just lack of knowledge. A sort of will to ignorance. It would explain some politicians.
From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.
Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.
Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.
Nor sink those stars in empty night; / They hide themselves in heaven's own light.
This is enough, at any rate, to confuse the matter, not that it wholly extinguishes the natural light which assures us of these things; the academicians would have won, but this obscures it, and troubles the dogmatists to the glory of the sceptical cabal, which consists in this ambiguous ambiguity, and in a certain doubtful haze, from which our doubts cannot take away all the light, nor our natural light banish all the darkness.
Best of all he liked to sleep. Sleeping was a very important activity for him. He liked to sleep for longish periods, great swathes of time. Merely sleeping overnight was not taking the business seriously. He enjoyed a good night's sleep and wouldn't miss one for the world, but found it as anything halfway near enough. He liked to be asleep by half-past eleven in the morning if possible, and if that should come directly after a nice leisurely lie-in then so much the better. A little light breakfast and a quick trip to the bathroom while fresh linen was applied to his bed is really all the activity he liked to undertake, and he took care that it didn't janate the sleepiness out of him and disturb his afternoon of napping. Sometimes he was able to spend an entire week asleep, and this he regarded as a good snooze. He had also slept through the whole of 1986 and hadn't missed it.
As men of inward light are wont To turn their optics in upon 't.
What is death? To go out like a light, and in a sweet trance to forget ourselves and all the passing phenomena of the day, as we forget the phantoms of a fleeting dream; to form, as in a dream, new connections with God's world; to enter into a more exalted sphere, and to make a new step up man's graduated ascent of creation.--_Zschokke._
And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers Is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.
Above the cloud with its shadow is the star with its light.
I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven.
A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent, like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are yet with us.
Climbing the dusty hill, some fair effigies that once stood for symbols of human destiny have been broken; those I still have with me show defects in this broad light. Yet enough is left, even by experience, to point distinctly to the glories of that destiny; faint, but not to be mistaken streaks of the future day. I can say with the bard, "Though many have suffered shipwreck, still beat noble hearts." Always the soul says to us all, Cherish your best hopes as a faith, and abide by them in action. Such shall be the effectual fervent means to their fulfilment.
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.
_For Port Royal to-morrow. Prosopopæa._--"It is in vain, O men, that you seek from yourselves the remedy for your miseries. All your light can only enable you to know that not in yourselves will you find truth or good. The Philosophers promised you these, but gave them not. They neither apprehend what is your true good nor what is....
Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars, points of light and reason. ...And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn’t see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason, for anything.
Are we running light with overbyte?
The first act of a new-born child is to draw a deep breath. In fact, it will never draw a deeper, inasmuch as the passages and chambers of the lungs, once distended with air, do not empty themselves again; it is only a fraction of their contents which passes in and out with the flow and the ebb of the respiratory tide. Mechanically, this act of drawing breath, or inspiration, is of the same nature as that by which the handles of a bellows are separated, in order to fill the bellows with air; and, in like manner, it involves that expenditure of energy which we call exertion, or work, or labour. It is, therefore, no mere metaphor to say that man is destined to a life of toil: the work of respiration which began with his first breath ends only with his last; nor does one born in the purple get off with a lighter task than the child who first sees light under a hedge.
Every light has its shadow.
The imagination does not perceive such excellent things as the eye, because the eye receives the images or semblances from objects, and transmits them to the perception, and from thence to the brain; and there they are comprehended. But the imagination does not issue forth from the brain, with the exception of that part of it which is transmitted to the memory, and in the brain it remains and dies, if the thing imagined is not of high quality. And in this case poetry is formed in the mind or in the imagination of the poet, who depicts the same objects as the painter, and by reason of the work of his fancy he wishes to rival the painter, but in reality he is greatly inferior to him, as we have shown above. Therefore with regard to the work of fancy we will say that there is the same proportion between the art of painting and that of poetry as exists between the body and the shadow proceeding from it, and the proportion is still greater, inasmuch as the shadow of such a body at least penetrates to {122} the brain through the eye, but the imaginative embodiment of such a body does not enter into the eye, but is born in the dark brain. Ah! What difference there is between imagining such a light in the darkness of the brain and seeing it in concrete shape set free from all darkness.
Now farewell light, thou sunshine bright, / And all beneath the sky! / May coward shame distain his name, / The wretch that dares not die.
The world exists for the exercise of mercy and judgment, not as if men were in it as they came from the hands of God, but as the enemies of God, to whom he gives by grace light enough to return, if they will seek him and follow him, and to punish them, if they refuse to seek him and follow him.
That is the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
He that doeth truth cometh to the light.
Ah, when shall all men's good Be each man's rule, and universal peace Lie like a shaft of light across the land, And like a lane of beams athwart the sea, Thro' all the circle of the golden year?
Why should the belief in the Son give everlasting life? Because Jesus has through His own sonship in God declared to us ours also. This knowledge gives us eternal life through the conviction that we too have something divine and eternal within us, namely, the word of God, the Son whom He hath sent. Jesus Himself, however, is the only begotten Son, the light of the world. He first fulfilled and illumined the divine idea which lies darkly in all men, and made it possible for all men to become actually what they have always been potentially--sons of God.
Hither, as to their fountain, other stars Repairing, in their golden urns draw light.
I wonder at the boldness with which these persons undertake to speak of God, in addressing their words to the irreligious. Their first chapter is to prove Divinity by the works of nature. I should not be astonished at their undertaking if they addressed their argument to the faithful, for it is certain that those who have a lively faith in their heart see at once that all that exists is none other than the work of the God whom they adore. But for those in whom this light is extinguished, and in whom we desire to revive it, men destitute of faith and grace who, seeking with all their light whatever they see in nature to lead them to this knowledge, find only clouds and darkness,--to tell them they need only look at the smallest things which surround them in order to see God unveiled, to give them as the sole proof of this great and important subject, the course of the moon and planets, and to say that with such an argument we have accomplished the proof; is to give them ground for belief that the proofs of our Religion are very feeble. Indeed I see by reason and experience that nothing is more fitted to excite contempt.
~Atheism.~--By burning an atheist, you have lent importance to that which was absurd, interest to that which was forbidding, light to that which was the essence of darkness. For atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.--_Colton._
Let us ask Him to work in us to _will_ those good works, so that our _will_, without being impaired in its free operation, may be permeated and moulded by His will, just as light suffuses the atmosphere without displacing it. And let us also expect that He will infuse into us sufficient strength that we may be able to _do_ His will unto all pleasing. Thus, day by day, our life will be a manifestation of those holy volitions and lovely deeds which shall attest the indwelling and inworking of God. And men shall see our good works, and glorify our Father which is in heaven.--_F. B. Meyer._
Sparkling and bright in liquid light Does the wine our goblets gleam in; With hue as red as the rosy bed Which a bee would choose to dream in.
Ah, but if we should go thoroughly into this matter, should we not probably find that many of us are guilty, in some modified and yet sufficiently alarming sense, of treachery to the poor? Are we not, some of us, sent to them with benefactions which never reach them, and are only unconscious of guilt because so long accustomed to look upon the goods as bestowed on us, whereas the light of God's word would plainly reveal upon those goods the names of the poor and needy?--_George Bowen._
T'his darkness will not last forever. There will some day come a Fifth of November — or another date, it doesn't matter — when fires will burn in a chain of brightness from Land's End to John O' Groats. The children will dance and leap about them as they did in the times before. They will take each other by the hand and watch the rockets breaking, and afterwards they will go home singing to the houses full of light…
What! Do you not say yourself that the sky and the birds prove God?--No.--And does not your religion say so?--No. For however it may be true in a sense for some souls to whom God has given this light, it is nevertheless false in regard to the majority.
The light of the body is the eye; if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
The light (which you refuse to take in) returns on you, condensed into lightning, which there is not any skin whatever too thick for taking in.
And oh if there be an Elysium on earth, It is this, it is this!
He that doeth evil hateth the light.
So, from your own point of view, suppose a mind-stuff--[--Greek--]--a noumenal cosmic light such as is shadowed in the fourth gospel. The brain of a dog will convert it into one set of phenomenal pictures, and the brain of a man into another. But in both cases the result is the consequence of the way in which the respective brains perform their "function."
Man\x92s destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth... I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish.
Come forth into the light of things, / Let Nature be your teacher.
The burst of new light, by its suddenness, always appears inimical to the unprepared heart.
We boast our light; but if we look not wisely on the sun itself, it smites us into darkness.
Led by the light of the M?onian star.
God is our light. The farther the soul strays away from God, the deeper it goes into darkness.--ST. ALPHONSUS.
Our intellect does not judge events which happened at various intervals of time in their true proportion, because many things which happened years ago appear recent and close to the present, and often recent things appear old and seem to belong to our past childhood. The eye does likewise with regard to distant objects which in the light of the sun appear to be close to the eye, and many objects which are close appear to be remote.
We fear disturbance, change, fear to bring to light and to talk about what is painful. Suffering often feels like failure, but it is actually the door into growth.
Secrecy of design, when combined with rapidity of execution, like the column that guided Israel in the desert, becomes the guardian pillar of light and fire to our friends, and a cloud of overwhelming and impenetrable darkness to our enemies.
An infant crying in the night, / An infant crying for the light; / And with no language but a cry.
The types of the completeness of redemption, as that the sun gives light to all, denote only completeness, but they figuratively imply exclusions, as the Jews elected to the exclusion of the Gentiles denote exclusion.
By what strange law of mind is it that an idea long overlooked, and trodden under foot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles out in new light, as a discovered diamond?
_State super vias et interrogate de semitis antiquis, et ambulate in eis. Et dixerunt: Non ambulabimus, sed post cogitationem nostram ibimus._ They have said to the nations: Come to us, we will follow the opinions of the new authors, reason shall be our guide, we will be as the other nations who follow each their natural light. Philosophers have....
Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.
The light of friendship is like the light of phosphorus--seen plainest when all around is dark.
His (Adam Smith’s) was a real universalism in intent. Laissez Faire was intended to establish a world community as well as a natural harmony of interests within each nation…. But the “children of darkness” were able to make good use of his creed. A dogma which was intended to guarantee the economic freedom of the individual became the “ideology” of vast corporate structures of a later period of capitalism, used by them, and still used, to prevent a proper political control of their power…. Marxism was the social creed and the social cry of those classes who knew by their miseries that the creed of the liberal optimists was s snare and a delusion…. Liberalism and Marxism share a common illusion of the “children of light.” Neither understands property as a form of power which can be used in either its individual or its social form as an instrument of particular interest against the general interest. Liberalism makes this mistake in regard to private property and Marxism makes it in regard to socialized property…. The Marxist illusion is partly derived from a romantic conception of human nature…. It assumes that the socialization of property will eliminate human egotism…. The development of a managerial class in Russia, combing economic with political power, is an historic refutation of the Marxist theory. [ The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness , 1944.]
Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.
Every discovery opens a new field for investigation of facts, shows us the imperfection of our theories. It has justly been said, that the greater the circle of light, the greater the boundary of darkness by which it is surrounded.
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
Were there no obscurity man would not be sensible of his corruption; were there no light man would despair of remedy. Thus it is not only just, but useful for us, that God should be partly hidden and partly revealed, because it is equally dangerous for man to know God without the knowledge of his misery, and to know his misery without the knowledge of God.
Some writers allege that the stars shine of {157} themselves, saying that if Venus and Mercury did not shine of themselves, when their light comes between them and the sun they would darken as much of the sun as they could hide from our eye; this is false, because it is proved that a dark body placed against a luminous body is enveloped and altogether covered by the lateral rays of the remaining part of that body, and thus remains invisible; as may be proved when the sun is seen through the boughs of a leafless tree at a long distance, the boughs do not hide any portion of the sun from our eyes. The same thing occurs with the above-mentioned planets, which, though they have no light in themselves, do not, as has been said, hide any portion of the sun from our eyes.
"Again the Lord said unto me: I have heard thee in the days of salvation and of mercy, and I have established thee for a covenant of the people, and to cause thee to inherit the desolate nations, that thou mayest say to those who are in chains: Go forth, and to those that are in darkness: Come into the light, and possess these abundant and fertile lands. They shall no more labour, nor hunger, nor thirst, neither shall the sun smite them; for he that hath mercy on them shall lead them, even by the springs of waters shall he guide them, and make the mountains plain before them. Behold, the peoples shall come from all parts, from the East and from the West, from the North and from the South. Let the heaven give glory to God, let the earth rejoice, for it hath pleased the Lord to comfort his people, and he will have mercy on the poor who hope in him.
Misled by fancy's meteor ray, By passion driven; But yet the light that led astray Was light from heaven.
Qu? lucis miseris tam dira cupido?=--How is it that the wretched have such an infatuated longing for life (
The internal heat of the earth, the elevation and depression of its crust, its belchings forth of vapours, ashes, and lava, are its activities, in as strict a sense as are warmth and the movements and products of respiration the activities of an animal. The phenomena of the seasons, of the trade winds, of the Gulf-stream, are as much the results of the reaction between these inner activities and outward forces as are the budding of the leaves in spring and their falling in autumn the effects of the interaction between the organisation of a plant and the solar light and heat. And, as the study of the activities of the living being is called its physiology, so are these phenomena the subject-matter of an analogous telluric physiology, to which we sometimes give the name of meteorology, sometimes that of physical geography, sometimes that of geology. Again, the earth has a place in space and in time, and relations to other bodies in both these respects, which constitute its distribution. This subject is usually left to the astronomer; but a knowledge of its broad outlines seems to me to be an essential constituent of the stock of geological ideas.
The virtuous soul is pure and unmixed light, springing from the body as a flash of lightning darts from the cloud; the soul that is carnal and immersed in sense, like a heavy and dank vapour, can with difficulty be kindled, and caused to raise its eyes heavenward.
Yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible.
Demoniac possession is mythical; but the faculty of being possessed, more or less completely, by an idea is probably the fundamental condition of what is called genius, whether it show itself in the saint, the artist, or the man of science. One calls it faith, another calls it inspiration, a third calls it insight; but the "intending of the mind," to borrow Newton's well-known phrase, the concentration of all the rays of intellectual energy on some one point, until it glows and colours the whole cast of thought with its peculiar light, is common to all.
The moon had climb'd the highest hill Which rises o'er the source of Dee, And from the eastern summit shed Her silver light on tower and tree.
Oh, fear not in a world like this, And thou shalt know erelong,-- Know how sublime a thing it is To suffer and be strong.
grande latte, double espresso, Italian blend, light on the froth, heavy on the cinnamon, with a shot of raspberry?
Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you.
Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.
I receive your love and I give you mine. Not the love of a man for women, not the love of a father for a child, not the love of God for his creatures, but a love with no name and no explanation, like a river that cannot explain why it follows sometimes we need to be strangers to ourselves. Then the hidden light in our soul will illuminate what we need to see.
For youth no less becomes / The light and careless livery that it wears, / Than settled age his sables and his weeds, / Importing health and graveness.
Feelings come and go like light troops following the victory of the present; but principles, like troops of the line, are undisturbed, and stand fast.
Recognise then the truth of religion even in the obscurity of religion, in the little light we have of it, and in the indifference we have to its knowledge.
What a marvel life seems to be the older we grow! So far from becoming more intelligible, it becomes a greater wonder every day. One stands amazed, and everything seems so small--the little one can do so very small. One ought not to brood too much, when there is no chance of light, and yet how natural it is that one should brood over life and death, rather than on the little things of life.