Ipsa quidem virtus sibimet pulcherrima merces (Virtue herself is her own fairest reward).--SILIUS ITALICUS (25?-99): _Punica, lib. xiii. line 663._ The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against fate; Death lays his icy hands on kings.
How they gleam like spirits through the shadows of innumerable eyes from their thrones in the boundless depths of heaven!
The cup which our Father giveth us to drink is a cup for the will. It is easy for the lips to drain it when once the heart has accepted it. Not on the heights of Calvary, but in the shadows of Gethsemane is the cup presented; the act is easy after the choice. The real battle-field is in the silence of the spirit. Conquer there, and thou art crowned.--_George Matheson._
Man is his own star, and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man Commands all light, all influence, all fate. Nothing to him falls early, or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
Et jam summa procul villarum culmina fumant, / Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbr?=--And now the cottage roofs yonder smoke, and the shadows fall longer from the mountain-tops.
Show his eyes, and grieve his heart; Come like shadows, so depart!
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows and of lending existence to nothing.
Alas! how little can a moment show Of an eye where feeling plays In ten thousand dewy rays: A face o'er which a thousand shadows go!
Like our shadows / Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.
Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, / Which show like grief itself, but are not so; / For sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears, / Divides one thing entire to many objects.
How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound! The greatest part of abstract terms are shadows that hide a vacuum.
Modesty is to merit what the shadows are to the figures on a picture; it imparts to it force and relief.
Who seeks Him in the dark and cold, / With heart that elsewhere finds no rest, / Some fringe of the skirts of God shall hold, / Though round his spirit the mists may fold, / With eerie shadows and fears untold.
Come like shadows, so depart.
Blessed day, and longed for--the world's great jubilee, the earth's long-looked-for Sabbath, groaning creation's joy, and nature's calm repose! Who would not cry, "Come, Lord Jesus, and end this troubled dream! Shatter the shadows of the long, dark night of sin and sorrow, sighing and tears, despair and death!"--_F. Whitfield._
The seen are shadows: the substance is found in the unseen. . . . No doubt, in Christ, the foundation of our faith is unseen; but so is that of yonder tower that lifts its tall erect form among the waves over which it throws a saving light. It appears to rest on the rolling billows; but, beneath these, invisible and immovable, lies the solid rock on which it stands secure; and when the hurricane roars above, and breakers roar below, I could go calmly to sleep in that lone sea tower. Founded on a rock, and safer than the proudest palace that stands on the sandy, surf-beaten shore, it cannot be moved. Still less the Rock of Ages! Who trusts in that is fit for death, prepared for judgment, ready for the last day's sounding trumpet, since, "The Lord redeemeth the soul of His servants, and none of them that trust in Him shall be desolate."--_Guthrie._
Coming events cast their shadows before.
Our sins, like to our shadows, when our day is in its glory, scarce appeared. Towards our evening how great and monstrous they are!--_Sir J. Suckling._
Old men's lives are lengthened shadows; their evening sun falls coldly on the earth, but the shadows all point to the morning.
Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbr?=--And the shadows lengthen as they fall from the lofty mountains.
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.
The worthy gentleman who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of the contest, whilst his desires were as warm and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.
Was the work of the Master indeed done? Was not its heaviest task yet to come? He had not yet met the dread hour of death. Why did He say that His work was done? It was because He knew that, when the will is given, the battle is ended. He was only in the shadows of the garden; but to conquer these shadows was already to conquer all. He who has willed to die has already triumphed over death. All that remains to Him is but the outer husk, the shell.
Therefore, since thou hast included music among the liberal arts, thou must either exclude it, or include the art of letters. And if thou wast to say: Painting is used by base men, in the same way is music spoilt by him who knows it not. If thou sayest that sciences which are not mechanical are mental, I will answer that painting is mental. And just as music and geometry deal with the proportions of continuous quantities, and {87} arithmetic deals with discontinuous quantities, painting deals with all quantities and the qualities of the proportions of shadows, lights and distances, in its perspective.
Love is enough: though the World be a-waning And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining, Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder, Though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder, And this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over, Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter; The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover.
NOWPRINT. NOWPRINT. Clemclone, back to the shadows again.
The best in this kind are but shadows.
Towers are measured by their shadows.
A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.
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.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, / Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof.
The man who fears not death will start at no shadows.
Know of a truth that only the time-shadows have perished or are perishable; that the real being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and for ever.
How we clutch at shadows= (in this dream-world) =as if they were substances, and sleep deepest while fancying ourselves most awake!
The Jews so loved the mere shadows, and waited for them so entirely, that they misunderstood the substance, when it came in the time and manner foretold.
~Grief.~--Why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at all, or you may never live to see it? for every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making.--_Sydney Smith._
Like our shadows, Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.
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._
She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Leisel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist's suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers...She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on...
Life by life and love by love We passed through the cycles strange, And breath by breath and death by death We followed the chain of change. Till there came a time in the law of life When o’er the nursing sod, The shadows broke and soul awoke In a strange, dim dream of God.
Manners are the shadows of virtues, the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow-creatures love and respect.
Love's heralds should be thoughts, / Which ten times faster glide than the sun's beams / Driving back shadows over lowering hills.
And if thou dost recognize that the mirror by means of outlines, lights and shadows gives relief to objects, and since thou hast in thy colours lights and shadows stronger than those of the mirror, there is no doubt that if thou composest thy picture well, it will also have the appearance of nature when it is reflected in a large mirror.
In this world, full often our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring, Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king.
To attack vices in the abstract without touching persons, may be safe fighting indeed, but it is fighting with shadows.
Sol crescentes decedens duplicat umbras=--The setting sun doubles the increasing shadows.
Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man Commands all light, all influence, all fate. Nothing to him falls early, or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.
Phaeton was his father's heir; born to attain the highest fortune without earning it; he had built no sun-chariot (could not build the simplest wheel-barrow), but could and would insist on driving one; and so broke his own stiff neck, sent gig and horses spinning through infinite space, and set the universe on fire.= _Carlyle._ [Greek: phantasmata theia, kai skiai ton onton]--Divine phantasms and shadows of things that are.
Nature's shadows are ever varying.
Party standards are shadows in which patriotism is buried.
Whoso can look on death will start at no shadows.
I've been sleeping through my life Now I'm waking up And I want to stand in the sunshine I have never been ecstatic Had a flower but it never bloomed In the darkness of my wasted youth It was hiding in the shadows Learning to become invisible Uncover me.
Man is a substance clad in shadows.
Democritus said, words are but the shadows of actions.
Men think to mend their condition by a change of circumstances. They might as well hope to escape their shadows.
Behold him setting in his western skies, The shadows lengthening as the vapours rise.
Who is your father?” “The Duke of Vlaska.” There was no hesitation in his voice, just a simple statement of fact. “I thought he was dead,” Libby said. “Are you suggesting you are the current Duke of Vlaska?” This time he looked directly at her, although in the dimness of the barn all she could see was a face carved in shadows and a curious glint in his eyes. “Succession in Romania works the same as in the other European countries. The oldest son is the Duke’s heir.” “And are you his oldest son?” “I am.
Que es la vida? Un frenesi. / Que es la vida? Una ilusion. / Una sombra, una ficcion, / Y el mayor bien es pequeno; / Que toda la vida es sueno, / Y los suenos, suenos son!=--What is life? A conceit of the fancy. What is life? An illusion, / a shadow, a fiction, and the greatest earthly possession insignificant; the whole of life nothing but a dream, and dreams are shadows.
External manners of lament / Are merely shadows to the unseen grief / That swells with silence in the tortured soul.
Where storm-born shadows hide and hunt I knew thee, in thy glorious youth, And loved thy vast face, white as truth; I stood where thunderbolts were wont To smite thy Titan-fashioned front, And heard dark mountains rock and roll; I saw the lightning's gleaming rod Reach forth and write on heaven's scroll The awful autograph of God!
The irony of history is nowhere more apparent than in science. Here we see the men, over whose minds the coming events of the world of biology cast their shadows, doing their best to spoil their case in stating it; while the man who represented sound scientific method is doing his best to stay the inevitable progress of thought and bolster up antiquated traditions. The progress of knowledge during the last seventy years enables us to see that neither Geoffroy, nor Cuvier, was altogether right nor altogether wrong; and that they were meant to hunt m couples instead of pulling against one another. Science has need of servants of very different qualifications; of artistic constructors no less than of men of business; of people to design her palaces and of others to see that the materials are sound and well-fitted together; of some to spur investigators, and of others to keep their heads cool. The only would-be servants, who are entirely unprofitable, are those who do not take the trouble to interrogate Nature, but imagine vain things about her; and spin, from their inner consciousness, webs, as exquisitely symmetrical as those of the most geometrical of spiders, but alas! as easily torn to pieces by some inconsidered bluebottle of a fact.
Pulvis et umbra sumus, fruges consumere nati=--We are but dust and shadows, born merely to consume the fruits of the earth.
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.
In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells
Some there be that shadows kiss, / Such have but a shadow's bliss.
What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!
Our ideas, like pictures, are made out of lights and shadows.
The man who walks along the path of life lives in the presence of the joy-giving God. Just in so far as he is true to that path of life, and wanders neither to the right hand nor to the left, his joy becomes deeper, nay! he becomes partaker of that very fullness of joy in which God Himself lives, and moves, and has His being. And while such is his experience in the midst of all the trials of life, he has also the privilege of looking forward to grander things yet in store for him, when that higher world shall be reached, and the shadows of time have passed away forever. "At Thy right hand," exclaims the psalmist, "there are pleasures for evermore."--_W. Hay Aitken._
On Fridays the little children come To trade their hooks for hands. Dead men leave eyes for others. Love is the uniform of my bald nurse. Love is the bone and sinew of my curse. The vase, reconstructed, houses The elusive rose. Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows. My mendings itch. There is nothing to do. I shall be good as new.
By the apostle Paul, shadows to-night Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers.
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.
'T is the sunset of life gives me mystical lore, And coming events cast their shadows before.
The external world of physics has … become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions. … The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose — and, alas, suffering and evil. The frank realisation that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.
Ceremony leads her bigots forth, / Prepared to fight for shadows of no worth; / While truths, on which eternal things depend, / Find not, or hardly find, a single friend.
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.--_Shelley._
It is the most painful work I know looking through the papers and other things belonging to one who is no more with us. How different everything looks to what it did before. There is one beautiful feature about death, it carries off all the small faults of the soul we loved, it makes us see the true littleness of little things, it takes away all the shadows, and only leaves the light. That is how it ought to be; and if in judging of a person we could only bring ourselves to think how we should judge of them if we saw them on the bed of death, how different life would be! We always judge in self-defence, and that makes our judgments so harsh. When they are gone how readily we forget and forgive everything, how truly we love all that was lovable in them, how we blame ourselves for our own littleness in minding this and that, and not simply and truly loving all that was good and bright and noble. How different life might be if we could all bring ourselves to be what we really are, good and loving, and could blow away the dust that somehow or other will fall on all of us. It is never too late to begin again.
The shadows fall thicker and thicker, but even in the shade it is well, often better than in full sunshine. And when the evening comes, one is tired and ready to sleep! And so all is ordered for us, if we only accommodate ourselves to it quietly.
You go down to the pickup station, craving warmth and beauty; You settle for less than fascination -- a few drinks later you're not so choosy. And the closing lights strip off the shadows</p> on this strange new flesh you've found -- Clutching the night to you like a fig leaf you hurry to the blackness and the blankets to lay down an impression and your loneliness. -- Joni Mitchell
Gil-galad was an Elven-king. Of him the harpers sadly sing: the last whose realm was fair and free between the Mountains and the Sea. His sword was long, his lance was keen, his shining helm afar was seen; the countless stars of heaven's field were mirrored in his silver shield. But long ago he rode away, and where he dwelleth none can say; for into darkness fell his star in Mordor where the shadows are. -- J. R. R. Tolkien
We are stronger than our skin of flesh and metal, for we carry and share a spectrum of suns and lands that lends us legends as we craft our immortality and interweave our destinies of water and air, leaving shadows that gather color of their own, until they outshine the substance that cast them.
One bright Sunday morning, in the shadows of the steeple, By the Relief Office, I seen my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there whistling, This land was made for you and me. Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway; Nobody living can ever make me turn back, This land was made for you and me. As I went walking, I saw a sign there, And on the sign it said: "No Trespassing." But on the other side, it didn't say nothing, That side was made for you and me. -- Woody Guthrie, "This Land Is Your Land" (verses 4, 6, 7) [If you ever wondered why Arlo was so anti-establishment when his dad wrote such wonderful patriotic songs, the answer is that you haven't heard all of Woody's songs]
NOWPRINT. NOWPRINT. Clemclone, back to the shadows again. -- The Firesign Theater
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. -- J. R. R. Tolkien, "The Lord of the Rings"
Cats, no less liquid than their shadows, offer no angles to the wind.
Upon the hearth the fire is red, Beneath the roof there is a bed; But not yet weary are our feet, Still round the corner we may meet A sudden tree or standing stone That none have seen but we alone. Still round the corner there may wait Tree and flower and leaf and grass, A new road or a secret gate, Let them pass! Let them pass! And though we pass them by today Hill and water under sky, Tomorrow we may come this way Pass them by! Pass them by! And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun, Home is behind, the world ahead, Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe, And there are many paths to tread Let them go! Let them go! Through shadows to the edge of night, Sand and stone and pool and dell, Until the stars are all alight. Fare you well! Fare you well! Then world behind and home ahead, We'll wander back to home and bed. Mist and twilight, cloud and shade, Away shall fade! Away shall fade! Fire and lamp, and meat and bread, And then to bed! And then to bed! -- J. R. R. Tolkien