Best 137 quotes in «abyss quotes» category

Not a bad thing to know something about darkness. You can’t talk about light without some knowledge of darkness. Like your buddy Nietzsche said, 'He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Soon the air of the high place was blowing in through the gaps in the masonry, the open bays, where the wind flowed like water round the arches of a bridge. Borluut felt refreshed fanned by this sea-breeze coming from the beaches of the sky: It seemed to be sweeping up dead leaves inside him. New paths, leading elsewhere, appeared in his soul; fresh clearings were revealed. Finally he found himself. Total oblivion as a prelude to taking possession of one's self! He was like the first man on the first day to whom nothing has yet happened. The delights of metamorphosis. He owed them to the tall tower, to the summit he had gained where the battlemented platform was ready for him, a refuge in the infinite. From that height he could no longer see the world, he no longer understood it. Yes, each time he was seized with vertigo, with a desire to lose his footing, to throw himself off, but not towards the ground, into the abyss with its spirals of belfries and roofs over the depths of the town below. It was the abyss above of which he felt the pull. He was more and more bewildered. Everything was becoming blurred - before his eyes, inside his head - because of the fierce wind, the boundless space with nothing to hold on to, the clouds he had come too close to, which long continued to journey on inside him. The delights of sojourning among the summits have their price.

Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.

O sun, heart of the heavens whose blood of light Infuses the vigor which transmutes to azure The black ice strangler of great space obscure I hate you, mask of gold, mist and fire, circular Blind monster blinding all the prey around You who veil the impure dazzling phantasm To the loving vertigo of my avid gazes The visions of the colorless abyss of the void Reversed hollow truth-mask of the other world.

Reality. I am stuck. I am hostage to my own destination.  When I close my eyes, my wings can take me anywhere in the universe. I abandon myself and I soar. Where only the most profound and intense souls can withstand the sick atmospheres.

Send a coin into the abyss and wish for a blissful kiss

Sometimes I trembled From the horror of my abyss.

Spinning the webs of meaning keeps me together, balancing my own pleasures and responsibilities with other's prevents me from falling into the abyss of emptiness.

The abyss is black and eventually I know I will smile, laugh even knowing all I think I know, maniacally while I howl at anything I could see that would laugh, snarl and howl the way I do.

Step, step, step, I fall and they lift me, slip-slop, slip-slop, through the watery mud. Each step is a heartbeat on my way to the grave, and the longest walk I will ever take. Plip, plip, I slip and they gather me. How strong are these savages, and how tight is their grip! Plip, plip, plip patters the rain, and I fall, and I call, and I stall for more time. But my time has run out.

The abyss doesn't stare back. It winks.

The abyss of absence. But who'll say: don't cry at night?

There's not one good thought in that place. There's nothing but waste and want. I can feel his selfish cravings and an abyss of secrets I hope to never know.

The careful observations and the acute reasonings of the Italian geologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the speculations of Leibnitz in the 'Protogaea' and of Buffon in his 'Théorie de la Terre;' the sober and profound reasonings of Hutton, in the latter part of the eighteenth century; all these tended to show that the fabric of the earth itself implied the continuance of processes of natural causation for a period of time as great, in relation to human history, as the distances of the heavenly bodies from us are, in relation to terrestrial standards of measurement. The abyss of time began to loom as large as the abyss of space. And this revelation to sight and touch, of a link here and a link there of a practically infinite chain of natural causes and effects, prepared the way, as perhaps nothing else has done, for the modern form of the ancient theory of evolution.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.

There is no feeling that is comparable to that of being truly lost. I don’t mean lost in the woods, or desert, but lost in the way that only can happen internally. Lost to the deepest, blackest pit of your soul, clinging to ghosts of past times, when you thought you knew who and what you were. When this happens, you have two choices; you can give in to your darkest inclinations, and accept what you are, or you can fight, knowing that it is a losing battle, that the good half of your soul is strong, but can never erase the bad part.

There was an image in my mind—an expectation of what it would be like when I finally gave myself fully to a man. It wasn’t like this. It was always at night with candles flickering lazily, music filling the air with a sexy melody, and maybe a bubble bath. But no. It was infinitely better, and there was no froo froo, stereotypical scene that played out. It was incredible. Brilliant. Amazing. Indescribable, really. Like all the planets in the galaxy aligned for a perfect moment in time. As if this was the beginning of time. From now until the rest of eternity, everything finally had meaning.

There was no justice in rebellion. This Javert had come to believe after seeing Marseille fall headfirst into the abyss of the revolution.

The woman turns away; one wing blackens like an onyx gem while the other glows white like a bright spotlight. She flies into the sky, leaving the crowd staring in astonishment. Angels fly away in two directions. Half make a black storm of moving, twisting shapes. The other half forms a white-as-snow moving cloud. The ranks are divided.

The self who is undone in the encounter with the abyss, that is, the preabyssal self, lives with a misguided consciousness. Without having faced or embraced the vertiginous depths beneath the precarious ground of its being, this self views itself as coherent and independent. I am here referring to the self who operates in clearly demarcated binaries and boundaries, the self who views God as distinct from the world, the other as separate from the "I," the spiritual as distinct from the physical. Conversely, the new self that emerges—if it does at all—from the abyss understands its nature not as an immutable substance but as multiple, fragmented, and always-in-becoming. In the abyss the old self is dissolved, emptied, abandoned, annihilated, lost, crushed, dismembered, shattered, and drowned.

The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss: It longed for the adventure of Ignorance

This is th' abyss. Behold wherein I lurk The lazar-house my mind, wherein do work The horrid charnel-priests, whose loathly song Sickens my soul, and quells the spirit strong.

This is why the deepest form of pain comes out as silence.

To see someone you love in so much pain—especially emotional pain that can’t be remedied—was the worst form of torture.

To have reservations is to show true leadership. To have certainty without question, to lead people to battle with no qualms, or to prosecute without hesitation are qualities of a tyrant.

When I came to see you It hurt me how thin you had become In the months of addiction & disease & although your particular abyss Was a man & not a drug The degradation was the same The same wasting of the flesh The same tapped-out well emptied Of the least leaf of emotion The same frozen rage

we all have one foot in a fairytale, and the other in the abyss

We both must burn this midnight oil together. You’re just as new to me as I am you.” --Andrew

What an abyss of ignorance hiding under the guise of love and care!

When a man is standing at the top of a cliff, it isn’t fear of falling that keeps him rooted to the edge — it’s the fear of not being able to resist the desire to jump, just to see what falling feels like.

We must avoid coming to too close quarters with life. It is a slender crust over which you must walk without bearing down too hard. Hit your heel into it and you make a hole in which you will disappear. True philosophy has never consisted in probing all problems, but often on the contrary eluding them. We are skirting an abyss: beware of vertigo.

What is more thrilling than BASE jumping into the abyss of one’s imagination?

When the ship approached the equator, I stopped going out on deck in the daytime. The sun burned like a flame. The days had shortened and night came swiftly. One moment it was light, the next it was dark. The sun did not set but fell into the water like a meteor. Late in the evening, when I went out briefly, a hot wind slapped my face. From the ocean came a roar of passions that seemed to have broken through all barriers:'We mus procreate and multiply! We must exhaust all the powers of lust!' The waves glowed like lava, and I imagined I could see multitudes of living beings - algae, whales, sea monsters - reveling in an orgy, from the surface to the bottom of the sea. Immortality was the law here. The whole planet raged with animation. At times, I heard my name in the clamor: the spirit of the abyss calling me to join them in their nocturnal dance. ("Hanka")

When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.

When they speak of Hell there's something they miss there's a worse place to be and it's called the Abyss.

While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the 'new', which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.

Before me is the abyss. How can I leap across it? And if I do not leap, how shall I ever be able to reach God?

Abyss-mongering makes professors and poets feel daring.

Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.

I am fond of them, of the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing.

But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abyss of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

Every consession gives rise to further concessions, we cannot back down, because behind us there is only an abyss, we must keep our promises and demand that they be kept.

Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.

Beyond is all abyss, eternity, whose end no eye can reach.

Genius is the true mystery, and at its edge--the abyss.

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

In retrospect, each of the steps toward this abyss seemed irrevocable, and yet they had all been so small!

I admire the Elsie Tanners and Barbara Windsors of the world: people who have crawled back from the abyss. I'm quite camp in that respect.

If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.