contrast quotes

Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant. Cold is agreeable, that we may get warm.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

Everybody’s got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

Ankles are nearly always neat and good-looking, but knees are nearly always not.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

The pause between the errors and trials of the day and the hopes of the night.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New.

The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

Hatred is blind, as well as love.

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

Because the sweeter the cake, the more bitter the jelly can be.

How terribly downright must be the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society.

The learned is happy, nature to explore; The fool is happy, that he knows no more.

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

A cherub’s face, a reptile all the rest.

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.

In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead.

Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.