"I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled... poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean."
In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. Since its first application in the field of rhetoric and drama in ancient Greece it became an important concept not just in philosophical aesthetics
"I resolved, therefore, to bend my studies towards the Holy Scriptures, that I might see what they were. But behold, I espy something in them not revealed to the proud, not discovered unto children, humble in style, sublime in operation, and wholly veiled over in mysteries. ...such are thy Scriptures as grew up together with thy little ones. But I much disdained to be held a little one; and big swollen with pride, I took myself to be some great man."
Sublime (philosophy)"There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous."
Sublime (philosophy)"Sublime Lucretius poetry will pass away Only when Earth has seen its final day."
Sublime (philosophy)"The eye is not the only organ of sensation by which a sublime passion may be produced. Sounds have a great power... Excessive loudness alone is sufficient to overpower the soul, to suspend its action, and to fill it with terror. The noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, or artillery, awakes a great and awful sensation in the mind, though we can observe no nicety or artifice in those sorts of music. The shouting of multitudes has a similar effect... the best-established tempers can scarcely forbear being borne down and joining in the common cry and common resolution of the crowd."
Sublime (philosophy)"[S]ublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small..."
Sublime (philosophy)"In the Old Testament stories... the sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable."
Sublime (philosophy)