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Sublime   /səblˈaɪm/   Listen
Sublime

adjective
(compar. sublimer; superl. sublimest)
1.
Inspiring awe.  Synonyms: empyreal, empyrean.  "Empyrean aplomb" , "The sublime beauty of the night"
2.
Worthy of adoration or reverence.  Synonym: reverend.
3.
Lifted up or set high.
4.
Of high moral or intellectual value; elevated in nature or style.  Synonyms: elevated, exalted, grand, high-flown, high-minded, idealistic, lofty, noble-minded, rarefied, rarified.  "Argue in terms of high-flown ideals" , "A noble and lofty concept" , "A grand purpose"



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"Sublime" Quotes from Famous Books



... would happen to public morals if belief were to be denied to the masses. Nietzsche speaks of Kant: "With the aid of his concept of 'Practical Reason,' he produced a special kind of reason, for use on occasions when reason cannot function: namely, when the sublime command, 'Thou shalt,' resounds." In his old age Kant became more bold, and perhaps voiced his true views, for we find that in "Religion Within the Limits of Pure Reason," he is actively antagonistic to ecclesiasticism, so much so that, for publishing this work, he was censured ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... public are admitted. This Tower which is seen in the engraving, stands, as stated, on an extensive Roman camp, or fortification. It would have been difficult to have selected a more appropriate situation for such a building; for the combination of picturesque and sublime scenery, united with the beauties of art, is no where more enthrilling to the mind than ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various

... he knows of few more lovely or more tiring. Fanny Burney described the drive as "the most beautiful to which my wandering feet have sent me; diversified with all that can compose luxuriant scenery, and with just as much approach to the sublime as is in the province of unterrific beauty." The long ascent of "Chiddick" Hill commences soon after leaving the mill pool just outside Bridport. To the right, a turning leads to Symondsbury, where there is an old cruciform church with a central tower ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... speaks often of that City on high, of which all other cities are but single habitations. From him in fact Cornelius Fronto, in his late discourse, had borrowed the expression; and he certainly meant by it more than the whole commonwealth of Rome, in any idealisation of it, however sublime. Incorporate somehow with the actual city whose goodly stones were lying beneath his gaze, it was also implicate in that reasonable constitution of nature, by devout contemplation of which it is possible for man to associate ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater

... art, religion, literature and every phase of human activity. It explains life, points the way to better things, gives us hope, strengthens the weary and heavy-laden, bids us look upward and onward, and constitutes the most sublime ideal ever conceived ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... &c. "When a friend inquired of Phidias what pattern he had formed his Olympian Jupiter, he is said to have answered by repeating the lines of the first Iliad in which the poet represents the majesty of the god in the most sublime terms; thereby signifying that the genius of Homer had inspired him with it. Those who beheld this statue are said to have been so struck with it as to have asked whether Jupiter had descended from heaven to show himself to Phidias, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... Francesco has similarly been confused with Piero della Francesca. Thus, Botticini's famous "Assumption," painted for Matteo Palmieri, and now in the National Gallery, already passed in Vasari's time for a Botticelli, and the attribution at Karlsruhe of the quaint and winning "Nativity" to the sublime, unyielding Piero della Francesca is surely nothing more than the echo of ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson

... century, tight-fitting, angular—in a word, detestable; verifying the truth of the proverb that extremes meet, by showing that the cut which all the wisdom of tailors and scientific fops, after centuries of study, had laboriously wrought out and foisted upon the poor civilised world as perfectly sublime, appeared in the eyes of backwoodsmen and Indians utterly ridiculous. No wonder that Harry, under the circumstances, became quietly insane, and went about committing nothing but mistakes the whole evening. No wonder that he emulated his father-in-law in abusing the gray cat, when he ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne

... art of sailing a boat. You remember Fanny Adair? She had a sublime confidence in herself that amounted to the first half of genius. She observed that, given a wind and a sail and a rudder, any person of common sense could make a boat move along. So she invited a ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke

... Strafford not to curse him: or, again, that wonderfully significant line, so full of a too tardy knowledge and of concentrated scorn, where Strafford first begs the king to "be good to his children," and then, with a contempt that is almost sublime, implores, "Stay, sir, do not promise, do not swear!" The whole of the second scene in the fifth act is pure genius. The reader, or spectator, knows by this time that all hope is over: that Strafford, though all unaware, is betrayed and undone. It is a subtle dramatic ruse, that ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp

... free! With prophetic glance, I see Visions of thy future glory, Giving to the world's great story A page, with mighty meaning fraught, That asks a wider range of thought. Borne onward on the wings of Time, I trace thy future course sublime; And feel my anxious lot grow bright, While musing on the glorious sight;— My heart rejoicing bounds with glee To hail ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... in which the Magdalen and St. Mary of Egypt are sitting, into dreamlands seen by poets in their moments of happiest inspiration? What but light and colour, the gloom and chill of evening, with the white-stoled figure standing resignedly before the judge, that give the "Christ before Pilate" its sublime magic? What, again, but light, colour, and the star-procession of cherubs that imbue the realism of the "Annunciation" with music which thrills us through ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson

... hills of Sapigneul and Brimont, and the Moronvillers mountain. Hearts were filled with hope, and the men were inspired by a sacred joy. Their sufferings and their wounds did not prevent the hearts of the soldiers in that spring of 1917 from flowering in sublime sacrifices ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux

... ideals, which in the hands of the Parisian demagogues had turned into sanguinary harlots, remain pure and virginal in the minds of the soldiers and their officers. Liberty, equality, the rights of man, the reign of reason—all these vague and sublime images moved before their eyes when they climbed the escarpment of Jemmapes under a storm of grapeshot, or when they wintered, with naked feet, among the snows of the Vosges. These ideas, in descending from heaven to earth, were ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... panic that would be inspired by his sudden appearance at Boulogne, and his preparations against England, he hoped to oblige that power to withdraw her naval force from the Mediterranean, and to prevent her sending out troops to Egypt. This project was often in his head. He would have thought it sublime to date an order of the day from the ruins of Memphis, and three months later, one from London. The loss of the fleet converted all these bold conceptions ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... seized the letter, read it, and turned deathly pale, then burning red. When she found words, she exclaimed: "And she has kissed my child, and he has kissed his child! They talk of the sublime, and their words do not cut their tongues! Everything is soiled! And he dared say to me: A prince has no private actions. His doings and his neglects set the example! Fie! Everything ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various

... crashing, 'Mid the plunging volleys thundering ever louder! There he clambers, there he stands, With the ensign in his hands,— O, was ever hero handsomer or prouder? Streaked with battle-sweat and slime, And sublime in the ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various

... as the richest and noblest; and for the same reason that makes geometry careless of language. The vilest jargon that ever was used by a shivering savage of Terra del Fuego is as capable of dealing with the sublime and eternal affections of space and quantity, with up and down, with more and less, with circle and radius, angle and tangent, as is the golden language of Athens.] and the story which illustrates it is ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... thou, who every art And science valuest I who are these that boast Such honour, separate from all the rest?" He answer'd: "The renown of their great names, That echoes through your world above, acquires Favour in heaven, which holds them thus advanced." Meantime a voice I heard: "Honour the bard Sublime![1] his shade returns, that ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock

... intellectual life, but the life of a swine wallowing in sensual indulgences; or a frivolous life, taking the outside of things as they strike the senses, and flitting from image to image thoughtlessly; or a quarrelsome life, where reason is swallowed up in anger and hatred. Again, however sublime the speculation and however active the intellect, if God is not constantly referred to, the mind is lifted indeed, but not to God. It is wisdom, then, in man during this life to look to God everywhere, and ever ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... can, therefore, ever be led according to the content of the ideas suggested to it, as well to sublime and noble deeds as, on the other hand, to expressions of the lower and barbaric instincts. That is the art of manipulating ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... patriotism scarcely rose to that sublime height which suffers its possessor unselfishly to advance a rival even for the public welfare. There is no doubt of DeWitt Clinton's conspicuous devotion to the interests of his country throughout the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... suddenly, one morning, I took it up not at all tenderly, indeed with a humorous appreciation of my own absurdities, and carried it out into the yard. An axe-helve is not a mere ornament but a thing of sober purpose. The test, after all, of axe-helves is not sublime perfection, but service. We may easily find flaws in the verse of the master—how far the rhythm fails of the final perfect music, how often uncertain the rhyme—but it bears within it, hidden yet evident, ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... VIII. stands the sublime figure of Hugh Latimer, most dauntless of preachers, the one man before whose stern rebuke the headstrong and masterful Tudor monarch quailed. It was Latimer that renewed the work of Wyclif. and in his life as well ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske

... enormous hieroglyphic which man must decipher or die. There fell upon both of them, but upon Turnbull more than the other, because he know more what the scene signified, that quite indescribable sense as of a sublime and passionate and heart-moving futility, which is never evoked by deserts or dead men or men neglected and barbarous, which can only be invoked by the sight of the enormous genius of man applied to anything other than the best. ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... dead? The heavy news Post-haste to Cobham calls the Muse, From where in Farringford she brews The ode sublime, Or with Pen-bryn's bold bard pursues ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... meadows, managed like a garden, A paradise of hops and high production; For, after years of travel by a bard in Countries of greater heat, but lesser suction, A green field is a sight which makes him pardon The absence of that more sublime construction, Which mixes up vines, olives, precipices, Glaciers, volcanos, oranges, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... which actuated me at this time. They do not appear to have flowed in a clear and pellucid stream. I discover a thirst for the surprising and experimental, for situations, dilemmas, and emergencies, sustained by the most sublime recklessness as to consequences. Then I see a dread of sinking into humdrum—the impulse never to be at rest; deeper than all this, I find a secret dissatisfaction with myself, a vague longing to use the best that is in me to some true purpose; a desire to leave the tangled skein, and "begin ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... will have conveyed only the ridiculous side of his appearance; but the ridiculous and the sublime are near, and the grotesque fiendishness of Chowbok's face approached this last, if it did not reach it. I tried to be amused, but I felt a sort of creeping at the roots of my hair and over my whole body, as I looked and wondered what he could possibly be intending ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... Restoration, declared "our poetry of the last age as rude as our architecture," and sneered at "that Paradise Lost of Milton's which some are pleased to call a poem," Dryden saw in it "one of the greatest, most noble and sublime poems which either this age or nation hath produced." But whether in mind or in life Dryden was as unlike the Elizabethans as he was in his earlier years unlike the men of the poetic school which followed him. Of that school, ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green

... Elizabeth of having trained him in lessons of vice. At first, horror at so monstrous a charge had sealed the queen's lips; but when she gave no denial, a juryman questioned her on the subject, and insisted on an answer. Then at last Marie Antoinette spoke in sublime indignation. "If I have not answered, it was because nature itself rejects such an accusation made against a mother. I appeal from it to ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge

... But the large world of such Has thousands—better taught, alike absurd, And less sublime. Of fame he soon got much, Where distant cataracts spout, of him men heard. Alas for Sam! Had he aright preferred The kindly element, to which he gave Himself so fearlessly, we had not heard That it was now his winding ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)

... By awful and sublime manifestations the world shall see that God rules in the heaven and on the earth. They shall learn that Anti-Christ is a false Christ. Then shall fear and repentance fall upon the people. The Jews shall be convinced, and converted, and persuaded ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild

... two broad streaks of laughter in his wake, is turned loose upon the reading public." This is as funny as Crosland at his best, say his round arm hit at Burns, the "incontinent and libidinous ploughman with a turn for verse"—a sublime bladder whack! But listen also to the poor victim, Mr Wilfred Blunt, M.P., and what he has to ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... memory as the most lovely verse that she had ever known, and the recitations of it in Miss Miranda's small classroom came back to her with an effect beautiful and tragic. And also there was the name of Victor Hugo, which Miss Miranda's insistent enthusiasm had rendered sublime and legendary to a sensitive child! Hilda now saw the sacred name stamped in gold on a whole set of elegant volumes! It was marvellous that she should have turned the page containing just that poem! It was equally marvellous that she should have discovered ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... and came to a passage around which faint lines were traced in faded ink;—the words thus marked were those of St. Paul, so sublime in their simplicity, so ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke

... favourite author, as above recited, took up the book again in the excess of his admiration and was composing himself for a further perusal of its sublime morality, when he was disturbed by a noise at the outer door; occasioned as it seemed by the endeavours of his servant to obstruct the entrance ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens

... traced her a considerable way, without ever dreaming who the person really was whom he thus pursued, and now he desired to speak with her attendant. Dolly was not a little surprised to see Sir Launcelot Greaves, of whose character she had conceived a very sublime idea from the narrative of Mr. Thomas Clarke; but she was still more surprised when he gave her to understand that he had charged himself with a pocket-book, containing the bank-notes which Miss Meadows had dropped in the house where they had been threatened with insult. Miss ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett

... teach us to do. I remember well an excellent bum (I mean excellently conforming to type), one Bain, who, growing restive under restraint, lost a position which he happened to have. I asked him what he was going to do now. There was something sublime about that being. He had faith that the Lord would provide. His simple reply was: "Well, the ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday

... suspicion that her present companion had suggested it, taking the rest that came to her and enjoying it as simply as a child would do, yet radiant at moments in the presage of national success, or pale with a glow of sublime faith at the efficacy of the sacrifice that was being offered up for her country. She seemed in harmony with the nature about her and the earnestness, perhaps tragedy, of her surroundings. Katie could not have been at home here; it was not ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various

... magnificent under its conditions; magnificent in two ways—first, in keenest perception of the main forms and facts in the creature; and, secondly, in the grandeur of line by which their forms are abstracted and insisted on, making every asp, ibis, and vulture a sublime spectre of asp or ibis or vulture power. The way for students to get some of this gift again (some only, for I believe the fulness of the gift itself to be connected with vital superstition, and with resulting intensity of reverence; people were likely to know something ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... especially about the latter, perhaps, a touch of comic suggestiveness in the sublime preoccupation to which we owe their great legacies, that look of Atlas which is always pathetic, when it is not foolish, on the face of a mortal: the grand air of a Goethe, the colossal absorption of a Balzac. Their attitude offends ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne

... has so largely acquired—the tide of which, sometimes diverted by transient causes, has always returned with accumulated force. With him it is no 'echo of folly, and shadow of renown,' but a deep, affecting, almost sublime national feeling, which exults in him as the living representative of national glory. If there be an exception in any place to this universal sentiment, let us hope that the impression will not endure, that the cloud of momentary error will ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... barbarian hordes, forms the most impressive chapter in the history of nations; as the mother-city of Christendom in the Middle Ages, and the later capital of the PAPAL STATES (q. v.) and seat of the Popes, it acquired fresh glory; it remains the most interesting city in the world; is filled with the sublime ruins and monuments of its pagan greatness and the priceless art-treasures of its mediaeval period; of ruined buildings the most imposing are the Colosseum (a vast amphitheatre for gladiatorial shows) and the Baths of Caracalla ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... to the poorest, were gilt and painted. Tattooing is part of the genius of those charming people, savages to some degree. The sublime colouring of their mountains, variegated by snows and meadows, reveals to them the rugged spell which ornament possesses in itself. They are poverty-stricken and magnificent; they put coats-of-arms on their cottages; they have huge asses, which they bedizen with bells, and huge ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... reports of those who have visited this splendid assemblage, who, having seen, have not failed to admire, and to give currency to their admiration. The following lines on Raphael, will be readily admitted as just by those who have seen some of his sublime pictures: ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard

... anything. Thus, whatever is high, great and deep, is treated as a matter of course, a commonplace, naturally at everybody's beck and call; something that can be readily acquired, and, if need be, imitated. Again, that which is sublime, god-like, demonic, must not be dwelt upon, simply because it is impossible or difficult to copy. Pseudo-culture accordingly talks of "excrescencies," "exaggerations," and the like—and sets up a novel system of aesthetics, which professes to rest upon Goethe— since ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)

... course of the world of thought, some view with delight and some with horror, the recrudescence of Supernaturalism which manifests itself among us, in shapes ranged along the whole flight of steps, which, in this case, separates the sublime from the ridiculous—from Neo-Catholicism and Inner-light mysticism, at the top, to unclean things, not worthy of mention in the same breath, at the bottom. In my poor opinion, the importance of these manifestations is often greatly over-estimated. The extant ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... he hired a small telescope, and through it caught a preliminary glimpse of the rich and varied fields in which for so many years he was to expatiate. Henceforward the purpose of his life was fixed: it was to obtain "a knowledge of the construction of the heavens";[9] and this sublime ambition he cherished to ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... the poet of psychic science, is profoundly the poet of practical, humanitarian progress, as was shown in his sublime poem, beginning, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various

... self-respect, he demonstrated to us daily our want of moral courage; he tainted our lives. Had we been a miserable gang of wretched immortals, unhallowed alike by hope and fear, he could not have lorded it over us with a more pitiless assertion of his sublime privilege. ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad

... who have fought and struggled for their country's liberty—I compared him with Aristides or Themistocles; the Corsicans were heroes; the country which rudely nursed those brave mountaineers—I had also a touch of sentiment for the sublime and beautiful in nature which a schoolboy does not always get from books,—such a country must be romantic. Should I ever ramble among its ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... coffee was heated for them, and for two hours they discussed the problems of this new front—Castelnau as eager to serve under Foch, for France, as, eight weeks ago, Foch had been to serve under Castelnau. If the sublime unselfishness of such men could have communicated itself to some of the minor figures of this war, how much more inspiring might be the stories of these ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin

... Kepp. The end of his contemplation and his deliberation came to this: She was beautiful, and she loved him, and his life was utterly wretched and lonely; so he determined on proving his gratitude by a sublime sacrifice. Before the girl had lifted her face from the needlework over which she had bent to hide her blushes, Horatio Paget had asked her to be his wife. Her emotion almost overpowered her as she tried to answer him; but she struggled ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... bring into view the customs, manners, vices, and the whole character of a people,—it is obvious that the Bible and the drama have some correspondence. If, in the somewhat heated language of Mrs. Jameson, "whatever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable and grave, whatever hath passion or admiration in the changes of fortune or the refluxes of feeling, whatever is pitiful in the weakness, grand in the strength, or terrible in the perversion of the human intellect," be the domain of tragedy, this correspondence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... quality than when heard at a distance of forty or fifty yards. When he had finished calling and flown away I crept out of my hole and walked back over the wet heath, thinking now of the cuckoo and now of that half natural, half supernatural but not very sublime being who, as I have said, was formerly a haunter of these parts. This was a question that puzzled my mind. It is easy to say that legends of the Devil are common enough all over the land, and date back to old monkish times or ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson

... never hurt our pure affection, even when we were young. He was my Bouilhet and more than that; for to my heart's intimacy was joined a religious reverence for a real type of moral courage, which had undergone all trials with a sublime SWEETNESS. I have OWED him everything that is good in me, I am trying to keep it for love of him. Is there not a heritage that our beloved ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... supposing the change to have originated among Buddhists, where it would be quite natural. For one of the most celebrated metempsychoses of Buddha is that detailed in the Sasa Jataka (Fausbll, No. 316, tr. R. Morris, Folk-Lore Journal, ii. 336), in which the Buddha, as a hare, performs a sublime piece of self-sacrifice, and as a reward is translated to the moon, where he can be seen to this day as "the hare in the moon." Every Buddhist is reminded of the virtue of self-sacrifice whenever the moon is full, and it is easy to ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs

... medicine, was well acquainted with the poetry of Lowe, author of that sublime lyric, "Mary's Dream," and at the request of Burns sent Lowe's classic song of "Pompey's Ghost," to the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... money, preparing to flee to foreign countries or at least to the Foreign Settlements for safety. The cautious work quietly and do not desire to earn merit but merely try to avoid giving offence. The scholars and politicians are grandiloquent and discourse upon their subjects in a sublime vein, but they are no better than the corrupt officials. As for our President, he can remain at the head of the State for a few years. At most he may hold office for several terms,—or perhaps for his whole life. Then questions must arise as to who shall succeed him; how to elect ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... have happened, the splendour of what did happen, mingle in the awed mind as you look over the city from the balcony. The city escaped. And the event seems vaster and more sublime than ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett

... characterized not merely by the brilliancy and purity of the language, but also by the variety and richness of the imagery. Among these the Arion, Pygmalion, and Der Heilige Lucas (St. Luke,) the Sonnets, and the sublime elegy, Rhine, dedicated to Madame de Stael, deserve especial mention, and give him a just claim ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... and everlasting snow, towering above the clouds, and piercing to the sky; on his other hand little every-day slopes, but green as emeralds, and studded with cows and pretty cots, and life; whereas those lofty neighbours stand leafless, lifeless, inhuman, sublime. Elsewhere sweet commonplaces of nature are apt to pass unnoticed; but, fronting the grim Alps, they soothe, and even gently strike, the mind by contrast with their tremendous opposites. Such, in their way, are the two halves of ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... of the seed-corn, which dies only, in order to bring forth much fruit; like that of the body, which is sown in corruption, in order to be raised in incorruption. Dahler remarks: "Because a more sublime religion, a more glorious state of things will take the place of the Mosaic dispensation, there will be no cause for regretting the loss of the symbol of the preceding dispensation, and people will no more remember it."—It is quite natural ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... thus, in ancient days of Caledon, [10] Was thy voice mute amid the festal crowd, When lay of hopeless love, or glory won, Aroused the fearful or subdued the proud. At each according pause was heard aloud Thine ardent symphony sublime and high! Fair dames and crested chiefs attention bowed; For still the burden of thy minstrelsy Was Knighthood's dauntless deed, and Beauty's ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... earth. Far distant hence In farther distant times, fair Liberty Shall reign, queen of the Seas, and lady of The Isles; nay, sovereign of the world's repose. And Peace! In her a mighty genius shall Arise, of high ethereal mould, great in Renown, sublime, superior far to praise Of sublunary man—or Fame herself. Though blind to all things here on earth below, The heav'ns of heav'ns themselves shall he explore, And soar on high with strong, with outstretched wings! There ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various

... constantly the sense of this dependence was present to his thoughts; and he has left on record that, in the moment of greatest danger to his career, his spirit turned instinctively to God before gathering up its energies into that sublime impulse, whose lustre, as the years go by, will more and more outshine his other deeds as the crowning glory of them all—when the fiery admiral rallied his staggered column, and led it past the hostile guns and the lost Tecumseh ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan

... Awake." He read it line by line and laughed. It was all so ridiculously simple. He hurried back to his rooms and wrote a much better one on "London Asleep." He was master of his subject. He wrote of what he had seen with effortless and sublime verity. Why not? Simply with the aid of pen and ink he transferred from the cells of his memory into actual phrases the silent panorama which he had seen with his own eyes. That one matchless hour before the dawn was entirely his. Throughout ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... that virtue and crime may be closely connected, and yet no stain be left upon the white robe of purity, and that while upon the one hand he sees abominations indulged in with impunity, upon the other, he witnesses a sublime generosity which cannot be weakened or crushed. The modest violet may exhale its fragrance through an overgrowth of noxious weeds—and humanity ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton

... which reminded Diana how often she had contended that all Mr. Lascelles' teeth were his own; that his nose was not a bit too long, being a facsimile of the feature which reared its sublime curve over the capricious mouth of his noble brother, the Earl of Castle Conway—notwithstanding all this, the Pythagorean pretensions of fashion began to lose their ascendency; and in the recesses of her mind, when Miss Dundas compared the ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... suffer us to be more than transiently amused with paradoxical morality. It is not that I consider this writer as wholly destitute of just notions. Amongst his irregularities, it must be reckoned that he is sometimes moral, and moral in a very sublime strain. But the general spirit and tendency of his works is mischievous,—and the more mischievous for this mixture: for perfect depravity of sentiment is not reconcilable with eloquence; and the mind (though corruptible, not complexionally vicious) would ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... No living truth by them unsung— No thought that hath not found a tongue In some strong lyre of olden time; Must every tuneful lute be still That may not give a world the thrill Of their great harp sublime? ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various

... Cherubim; But, through thy "Paradise Lost," and "Regained," We might, enchanted, wander evermore. Of all the genius-gifted thou hast reigned King of our hearts; and, till upon the shore Of the Eternal dies the voice of Time, Thy name shall mightiest stand—pure, brilliant, and sublime. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... and hapless? Nay: Through death, life grew sublime. Speak after sentence? Yea: And ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various

... and the wretched fate of his country. His fade assumption of dignity, the art with which he threw the veil of mystery over his frivolous tendencies and made his commonplace ideas pass for something incredibly sublime, naturally met with astonishing ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... scan the various operations; look at the foam beneath the bows, or at the smooth, eddying, serpentine track left far behind. I also loved to gaze from this elevated position upon the broad ocean, bounded on every side by the clear and distant horizon a grand and sublime sight. And then I indulged in daydreams of the most pleasing description, and built gay and fantastic castles in the air, which my reason told me the next moment ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... to stop building he would die. Seraglio Point has been abandoned by the court, and the sultan lives in a palace on the Bosphorus, and one of the loveliest spots on earth is left to decay. We entered through the magnificent gate of the Sublime Porte, passed the barracks, which are still occupied by the soldiers, visited the arsenal and saw the wax figures of the Janizaries and others in Turkish costume. The upper part of the pleasure-grounds is in a neglected state, and those ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various

... headlong from his horse, riddled with bullets. But he gave the enemy very little time to practice on him. I was not close enough to hear what he said, but he called to those Ohio men in a ringing tone, and waved his hat towards the enemy. The effect was instantaneous and sublime. The whole line went forward with a furious yell, and surged over the Confederate works like a big blue ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell

... first is mere guess-work, the second is determined by rule and measure. Of the more empirical arts, music is given as an example; this, although affirmed to be necessary to human life, is depreciated. Music is regarded from a point of view entirely opposite to that of the Republic, not as a sublime science, coordinate with astronomy, but as full of doubt and conjecture. According to the standard of accuracy which is here adopted, it is rightly placed lower in the scale than carpentering, because the latter is more capable of being ...
— Philebus • Plato

... petere, advocata contione varie militum versat animos castigando adhortandoque: mirari se, quinam pectora semper impavida repens terror invaserit.... Alpes quidem habitari, coli, {5} gignere atque alere animantes; pervias fauces esse exercitibus. Eos ipsos, quos cernant, legatos non pinnis sublime elatos Alpes transgressos. Ne maiores quidem eorum indigenas, sed advenas Italiae cultores has ipsas Alpes ingentibus saepe agminibus cum {10} liberis ac coniugibus migrantium modo tuto transmisisse. Militi quidem armato nihil secum praeter ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... bold, he said. Make the Kingdom a Commonwealth and the nation will be saved. He continued in these noteworthy words: "The enemy is at the gates, and we must be friends or perish. Adversity is a school of the sublime virtues. Necessity is an eloquent reconciler of differences.... By saying to Britain—Be an armed nation, she secures her defence and seals her freedom. A million of armed men, supporting the State with their purse, and defending it with their lives, will know that none have so ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... Mr. Stratford Canning, when only twenty years of age, had been selected to accompany Mr. Adair on a special mission to Constantinople. The following year, on Mr. Adair being appointed H.B.M. Minister to the Sublime Porte, Stratford Canning became Secretary of Legation. ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles

... falsehood, to set forth a plain statement of what I knew to be truth. Indeed it is indescribable how disgusting the painted face, the gaudy trappings, and the arrogant assumptions of the great harlot appeared in my eyes, when thus contrasted with the sublime simplicity, purity, and modesty of the chaste spouse ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth

... for there is no one whose society is as attractive to me as yours; there is no one in whom I find so many of my ideas, and yet there is no one from whom I am so widely separated; at times you are sublime, and then you turn round and roll in the ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore

... invisible god," a prayer offered up in time of pestilence, we have the most remarkable references to the destruction of the people by stones and fire. It would almost seem as if this great prayer, noble and sublime in its language, was first poured out in the very midst of the Age of Fire, wrung from the human heart by the most appalling calamity that ever overtook the race; and that it was transmitted from age to age, as the hymns of the Vedas and the prayers ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... trains run in and out under her knees unheeded. "Still, still you know," March argued, "this is the Loreley on the Rhine, and not the Loreley on the Hudson; and I suppose that makes all the difference. Besides, the Rhine doesn't set up to be sublime; it only means to be storied and dreamy and romantic and it does it. And then we have really got no Mouse Tower; we might ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... indeed, make a proper distinction between art as "technical dexterity" and art as related to the "sublime," the "beautiful," the "pathetic," the "humorous," the "melodious," and admits that it is possible to apply an "objective test" to technical skill—to decide that this line scans, that this rhyme is flawless, that these ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

... sublime peaks, the pinnacles of our globe, is so extensive, that a plane, resting on elevations 21,000 feet, may be stretched in one direction as far as the Hindoo Cosh, for upwards of 1,000 miles, above which rise loftier summits, increasing in height ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various

... family had all the attractiveness of a poem by Lord Byron, whose difficult passages were translated differently by each person in fashionable society; a poem that grew more obscure and more sublime from strophe to strophe. The reserve which Monsieur and Madame de Lanty maintained concerning their origin, their past lives, and their relations with the four quarters of the globe would not, of itself, have been for long ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac

... names of the owner of Gross-Aspern, who had been killed on the third day) was the sole compensation ever given to the family, he said, in a tone of deep sadness: "It was a time of great misery, and of great hopes; but now are the days of forgetfulness." The saying seemed to me sublime in its simplicity; but when I came to reflect upon the matter, I felt there was some justification for the apparent ingratitude of the House of Austria. Neither nations nor kings are wealthy enough to reward all the devotions ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... cut the following paragraph out of a newspaper: Is this the ridiculous tripping up the sublime? I think otherwise: it is honest to use plain terms. I speak as unto wise men—judge ye what I say. With respect to the fact of information, it may or it may not be true; but even if untrue, the idea ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... so touching and pathetic, as could be equalled by none whose hearts were not as much affected by the words as their senses were by the music. The sight of so many little innocents joining in the most sublime harmony made me almost think myself already amongst the heavenly choir, and it was a great mortification to me to be brought back to this sensual world by so gross an attraction as a call to supper, which put an end to our concert, and carried us ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott

... deserved this severity, it was David. It was at the expense of the Court of Louis XVI. that this ungrateful being was sent to Rome, to perfect himself in his sublime art. His studies finished, he was pensioned from the same patrons, and upheld as an artist by the special protection of every member of the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe

... how they feel sensation? Or dust make suggestion of its own creation? Yet if man were better than his base conditions, Could things baser fetter his sublime ambitions? ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor

... and like those who draw in their breath: thus did he stand, the sublime one, and ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... boon or a curse to humanity depends absolutely on the spirit in which it is applied. Just now we find ourselves engaged in a desperate conflict between materialism and morality—between consummate knowledge organized for evil ends, and the sublime ideal of public right. Education has done for Germany all that Education, divorced from Morality, can do; and the result has been a defeat of civilization and a destruction of human happiness such as Europe has not seen since the Middle Age closed in blood. What ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... on the mountain-crest sublime, Or down the oaken glade, Oh, what have I to do with time? For this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... mild contempt at their stupid foolhardiness even as his pulse quickened to their bravery. They had been fanatics, true enough, but theirs was a selfless fanaticism that would risk torture and death for what they believed—a fanaticism that was more sublime than the concept of Brotherhood which had evolved from it. They knew nothing of the enmity of race, of the incessant struggle man had since waged with alien intelligences all too willing to destroy intruders who encroached upon their worlds. Mankind's early selflessness had long ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone

... formation and perfect filbert nails, I read a likeness whose prototype, struggle how I would, I could not recall. Gradually the hand moved upwards, and, reaching the throat, the fingers set to work, at once, to remove the wrappings. My terror was now sublime! I dare not imagine, I dare not for one instant think, what I should see! And there was no getting away from it; I could not stir an inch, not the fraction of an inch, and the ghastly revelation would take place within a ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... fault is timidity, which is only not recognized as such on account of its vast proportions. I grant, then, that the funk is sublime, which is a true and friendly admission.—A letter to the N.Y. Tribune, in Lit. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall



Words linked to "Sublime" :   archaism, noble, sublimity, sacred, evaporate, gasify, vaporise, vaporize, archaicism, glorious, elated, elevated, change, condense, aerify



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