Paradise is under the shadow of our swords.
Dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
When the last eagle flies over the last crumbling mountain And the last lion roars at the last dusty fountain In the shadow of the forest though she may be old and worn They will stare unbelieving at the last unicorn.
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.
It makes a great difference to the force of any sentence whether there be a man behind it or no. In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some moneyed corporation, or some dangler, who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody.
Why should I make a shadow where God makes all so bright?
The dark in soul see in the universe their own shadow; the shattered spirit can only reflect external beauty, in form as untrue and broken as itself.
Where there is much light there is a darker shadow.
What prompts thee, O man, to abandon thy habitations in the city, to leave thy parents and friends, and to seek rural spots in the mountains and valleys, if it be not the natural beauty of the world, which, if thou reflectest, thou dost enjoy solely by means of the sense of sight? And if the poet wishes to be called a painter in this connection also, why didst thou not take the descriptions of places made by the poet and remain at home without exposing thyself to the heat of the sun? Oh! would not this have been more profitable and less fatiguing to thee, since this can be done in the cool without motion and danger of illness? But the soul could not enjoy the benefit of the eyes, the windows of its dwelling, and it could not note the character of joyous {76} places; it could not see the shady valleys watered by the sportiveness of the winding rivers; it could not see the various flowers, which with their colours make a harmony for the eye, and all the other objects which the eye can apprehend. But if the painter in the cold and rigorous season of winter can evoke for thee the landscapes, variegated and otherwise, in which thou didst experience thy happiness; if near some fountain thou canst see thyself, a lover with thy beloved, in the flowery fields, under the soft shadow of the budding boughs, wilt thou not experience a greater pleasure than in hearing the same effect described by the poet?
Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.
False friends are like our shadow, close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade.
A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them.--_George Eliot._
Praise is virtue's shadow; who courts her doth more the handmaid than the dame admire.
Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York, And all the clouds that loured upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths, Our bruised arms hung up for monuments, Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings, Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front; And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds To fright the souls of fearful adversaries, He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them,-- Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun.
Second proof. They say that the stars shine most brightly at night in proportion as they are high; and that, if they did not shine of themselves, the shadow cast by the earth between them and the sun would darken them, since they would not see nor be seen by the sun. But these have not taken into consideration that the conical shadow of the moon does not reach many of the stars, and even for those it does reach the shadow is diminished to such an extent that it covers very little of the star, and the remaining part is illumined by the sun.
Gloria virtutis umbra=--Glory is the shadow (_i.e._, the attendant) of virtue.
Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?
Always there is a black spot in our sunshine, the shadow of ourselves.
There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.
The chief good is the suspension of the judgment, which tranquillity of mind follows like its shadow.
He is there; I feel him, one ten-thousandth of an inch outside my range of vision. I stalk him. He stalks me. The man who wrote these books is not the man who lives in them. That man is the form; Will Henry is the shadow. And now that shadow lives in me. And it lives in you.
We reap what we sow, but Nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit that spring from no planting of ours.
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted--Nevermore!
Reason is like an officer when the King appears; The officer then loses his power and hides himself. Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.
Some people say that they can derive no help, no comfort, from what they call spiritual _only_. Spiritual _only_--think what that _only_ would mean, if it could have any meaning at all. We might as well say of light that it is light only, and that what we want is the shadow which we can grasp. So long as we know the shadow only, and not the light that throws it, the shadow only is real, and not the light. But when we have once turned our head and seen the light, the light only is real and substantial, and not the shadow.
Six hours to sleep allot: to law be six addressed; / Pray four: feast two: the Muses claim the rest.= _ On the fly-leaf of an old lawbook from Coke. See_ =Sex horas, &c.= [Greek: skias onar anthropoi]--Men are the dream of a shadow.
Love like a shadow flies when substance love pursues; / Pursuing that that flies, and flying what pursues.
Which highest mortal, in this inane existence, had I not found a shadow-hunter or shadow-hunted; and, when I looked through his brave garnitures, miserable enough?
Auch ein Haar hat seinen Schatten=--Even a hair casts its shadow.
Nature is the immense shadow of man.
The reputation of a man is like his shadow--gigantic when it precedes him, and pigmy in its proportions when it follows.
On seeing his shadow fall on such ancient rocks, he had to question himself in a different context and ask the same old question as before, "Who am I?", and the answer now came more emphatically than ever before, "No-one." But a no-one with a crown of light about his head. He would remember a verse from Pindar: "Man is a dream about a shadow. But when some splendour falls upon him from God, a glory comes to him and his life is sweet."
Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.
Amittit merito proprium, qui alienum appetit=--He who covets what is another's, deservedly loses what is his own. (Moral of the fable of the dog and the shadow.)
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more! It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.
Envy offends with false infamy, that is to say, by detraction which frightens virtue. Envy must be represented with the hands raised to heaven in contempt, because if she could she would use her power against God. Make her face covered with a goodly mark; show her as wounded in the eye by a palm-branch, and wounded in the ear by laurel and myrtle, to signify that victory and truth offend her. Draw many thunderbolts proceeding from her as a symbol of her evil-speaking. Make her lean and shrivelled up, because she is continual dissolution. Make her heart gnawed by a swelling serpent. Make her a quiver full of tongues for arrows, because she often offends with these. Make her a leopard's skin, because the leopard kills the lion through envy and by deceit. Place a vase in her hand full of flowers, and let it be full also of scorpions, toads and other reptiles. Let her ride Death, because Envy, which is undying, never wearies of sovereignty. {134} Make her a bridle loaded with divers arms, because her weapons are all deadly. As soon as virtue is born it begets envy which attacks it; and sooner will there exist a body without a shadow than virtue unaccompanied by envy.
The other shape, If shape it might be call'd that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb; Or substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd, For each seem'd either,--black it stood as night, Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell, And shook a dreadful dart; what seem'd his head The likeness of a kingly crown had on. Satan was now at hand.
When the sun is highest, he casts the least shadow.
We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.
Let beeves and home-bred kine partake The sweets of Burn-mill meadow; The swan on still St. Mary's Lake Float double, swan and shadow!
To-morrow comes, true copy of to-day, And empty shadow of what is to be; Yet cheated Hope on future still depends, And ends but only when our being ends.
Despise no enemy, however insignificant he may be--see how the shadow of the earth causes an eclipse of the moon, or how a midge brings a tear to the eye of a lion.
Philosophy and theology are become theorem, brain-web and shadow, wherein no earnest soul can find solidity for itself. Shadow, I say; yet shadow projected from an everlasting reality within ourselves. Quit the shadow, seek the reality.
Error is but the shadow of truth.
Fallit enim vitium, specie virtutis et umbra, / Cum sit triste habitu, vultuque et veste severum=--For vice deceives under an appearance and shadow of virtue when it is subdued in manner and severe in countenance and dress.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
Il can battuto dal bastone ha paura dell' ombra=--The dog that has been beaten with a stick is afraid of its shadow.
Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings.
Ambition is but the evil shadow of aspiration.--_George MacDonald._
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.
Epicurus perhaps saw the shadows of columns on the walls in front of them equal to the diameter of the column which cast the shadow; and since the breadth of the shadows are parallel from beginning to end he considered that he might infer that the sun also was directly opposite to this parallel, and consequently no broader than the column; and he did not perceive that the diminution of the shadow was insensibly small owing to the great distance of the sun. If the sun were smaller than the earth, the stars in a great portion of our hemisphere would be without light--in contradiction to Epicurus, who says the sun is only as large as it appears to be.
Membra reformidant mollem quoque saucia tactum; / Vanaque sollicitis incutit umbra metum=--The wounded limb shrinks from even a gentle touch, and the unsubstantial shadow strikes the timid with alarm.
One look up to heaven, and all this dust of the highroad of life vanishes. Yes! one look up to heaven and that dark shadow of death vanishes. We have made the darkness of that shadow ourselves, and our thoughts about death are very ungodly. God has willed it so; there is to be a change, and a change of such magnitude that even if angels were to come down and tell us all about it, we could not understand it, as little as the new-born child would understand what human language could tell about the present life. Think what the birth of a child, of a human soul, is; and when you have felt the utter impossibility of fathoming that mystery, then turn your thoughts upon death, and see in it a new birth equally unfathomable, but only the continuation of that joyful mystery which we call a birth. It is all God's work, and where is there a flaw in that wonder of all wonders, God's ever-working work? If people talk of the miseries of life, are they not all man's work?
Alas for the fate of men! Even in the midst of the highest prosperity a shadow may overturn them; but if they be in adverse fortune a moistened sponge can blot out the picture.--_Æschylus._
The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until people learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in themselves — as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government — this sort of thing will continue to occur.
The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.
Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.
Magni nominis umbra=--The shadow of a great name.
Hope is a delusion; no hand can grasp a wave or a shadow.--_Victor Hugo._
Truth is the body of God, and light his shadow.
We recognize a noble image, a marvellous conception, a supreme figure, an exalted shadow, an infinite representation of the represented infinity, a spectacle worthy of the excellence and supremacy of Him who transcendeth understanding, comprehension or grasp. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest; He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds.
Life is a parting shadow and youth a departing guest.
The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow, and the proportion is the same between poetry and painting. Because poetry produces its results in the {66} imagination of the reader, and painting produces them in a concrete reality outside the eye, so that the eye receives its images just as if they were the works of nature; and poetry produces its results without images, and they do not pass to the brain through the channel of the visual faculty, as in painting.
No, no! I am but shadow of myself; / You are deceived, my substance is not here.= 1
Think not thy own shadow longer than that of others.
In everything that lives, if one looks searchingly, is limned the shadow line of an idea — an idea, dead or living, sometimes stronger when dead, with rigid, unswerving lines that mark the living embodiment with the stern immobile cast of the non-living. Daily we move among these unyielding shadows, less pierceable, more enduring than granite, with the blackness of ages in them, dominating living, changing bodies, with dead, unchanging souls. And we meet, also, living souls dominating dying bodies — living ideas regnant over decay and death.
Friendship is the shadow of the evening, which strengthens with the setting sun of life.
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
Here lies one whose name was writ in water. So his life has flowed From its mysterious urn a sacred stream, In whose calm depth the beautiful and pure Alone are mirrored; which, though shapes of ill May hover round its surface, glides in light, And takes no shadow from them.
I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality, that it is but a shadow's shadow.
The death of a child is as if the flash of the Divine eye had turned quickly away from the mirror of this world, before the human consciousness woke up and thought it recognised itself in the mirror, often only to perceive for a moment, just as it closes its eyes for the last time, that that which it took for itself was the shadow or reflection of its eternal self.
The land of darkness and the shadow of death.
Small service is true service while it lasts. Of humblest friends, bright creature! scorn not one: The daisy, by the shadow that it casts, Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun.
Wo viel Licht ist, ist starker Schatten=--The shadow is deeper where the light is strong.
I wonder if I’m just a punctured shadow of the person I was before.
Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.
Far or forgot to me is near; / Shadow and sunlight are the same; / The vanished gods to me appear; / And one to me are shame and fear.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats, tho' unseen, amongst us.
Even a single hair casts its shadow.
Carter says I should tell you why it's called that. It's a cave full of all sorts of birds. Again--duh
"I know not who has sent me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am; I am terribly ignorant of every thing; I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul, nor even that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects on all and on itself, yet is as ignorant of itself as of all beside. I see those dreadful spaces of the universe which close me in, and I find myself fixed in one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am set in this place rather than elsewhere, nor why this moment of time given me for life is assigned to this point rather than another of the whole Eternity which was before me or which shall be after me. I see nothing but infinities on every side, which close me round as an atom, and as a shadow which endures but for an instant and returns no more. I know only that I must shortly die, but what I know the least is this very death which I cannot avoid.
Go, forget me! why should sorrow O'er that brow a shadow fling? Go, forget me, and to-morrow Brightly smile and sweetly sing! Smile,--though I shall not be near thee; Sing,--though I shall never hear thee!
The shadow cloak'd from head to foot.
Prayer is the forerunner of mercy. Turn to sacred history and you will find that scarcely ever did a great mercy come to this world unheralded by supplication. Prayer is always the preface to blessing. It goes before the blessing _as the blessing's shadow_. When the sunlight of God's mercies rises upon our necessities it casts the shadow of prayer far down upon the plain. Or, to use another illustration, when God piles up a hill of mercies He Himself shines behind them, and He casts on our spirits the shadow of prayer so that we may rest certain, if we are much in prayer, our pleadings are the shadows of mercy. Prayer is thus connected with the blessing to show us the value of it.--_Spurgeon._
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life 's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
Few men have the natural strength to honour a friend's success without envy. . . . I well know that mirror of friendship, shadow of a shade.
Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one.
God keeps a school for His children here on earth and one of His best teachers is Disappointment. My friend, when you and I reach our Father's house, we shall look back and see that the sharp-voiced, rough; visaged teacher, Disappointment, was one of the best guides to train us for it. He gave us hard lessons; he often used the rod; he often led us into thorny paths; he sometimes stripped off a load of luxuries; but that only made us travel the freer and the faster on our heavenward way. He sometimes led us down into the valley of the death-shadow; but never did the promises read so sweetly as when spelled out by the eye of faith in that very valley. Nowhere did he lead us so often, or teach us such sacred lessons, as at the cross of Christ. Dear, old, rough-handed teacher! We will build a monument to thee yet, and crown it with garlands, and inscribe on it: _Blessed be the memory of Disappointment!_--_Theodore Cuyler._
We are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth are a shadow.
The whole function of the artist in the world is to be a seeing and a feeling creature; to be an instrument of such tenderness and sensitiveness that no shadow, no hue, no line, no instantaneous and evanescent expression of the visible things around him, nor any of the emotions which they are capable of conveying to the spirit which has been given him, shall either be left unrecorded, or fade from the book of record.
There is something too dear in the hope of seeing again.... "Dear heart, be quiet;" we say; "you will not be long separated from those people that you love; be quiet, dear heart!" And then we give it in the meanwhile a shadow, so that it has something, and then it is good and quiet, like a little child whose mother gives it a doll instead of the apple which it ought not to eat.
Some there be that shadows kiss, / Such have but a shadow's bliss.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power / Floats, though unseen, among us.
The bird let loose in Eastern skies, Returning fondly home, Ne'er stoops to earth her wing, nor flies Where idle warblers roam; But high she shoots through air and light, Above all low delay, Where nothing earthly bounds her flight, Nor shadow dims her way.
You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.