Distance quotes
2.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside distance — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future."
"Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies."
"We are the ones who have distanced ourselves from God and then we've blamed him for the distance."
"A lot of people wonder how a 21-year-old with average power (I finished 89th in driving distance) can be so successful. The answer is simple: I know how to score."
"Most of my friends are into strange things I don't really understand - and with a few shameful exceptions I wish them all well. Who am I, after all, to tell some friend he shouldn't change his name to Oliver High, get rid of his family, and join a Satanism cult in Seattle? Or to argue with another friend who wants to buy a single-shot Remington Fireball so he can go out and shoot cops from a safe distance?"
"There are innumerable worlds of different sizes. In some there is neither sun not moon, in others they are larger than in ours and others have more than one. These worlds are at irregular distances, more in one direction and less in another, and some are flourishing, others declining. Here they come into being, there they die, and they are distroyed by collision with one another. Some of the worlds have no animal or vegetable life nor any water."
"Your eyes wider than distance, this life is sweeter than fiction."
"Distance is temporary, but our love is permanent. This may be the last time I see you, but if you keep me in your heart, together we shall be eternal; if you believe, we shall never part."
"It is easy to be brave from a safe distance."
"We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity will disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves; whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavors in it, may also become clearer."
"I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself."
"There is a cheap literature that speaks to us of the need of escape. It is true that when we travel we are in search of distance. But distance is not to be found. It melts away. And escape has never led anywhere. The moment a man finds that he must play the races, go the Arctic, or make war in order to feel himself alive, that man has begin to spin the strands that bind him to other men and to the world. But what wretched strands! A civilization that is really strong fills man to the brim, though he never stir. What are we worth when motionless, is the question."
"In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future."
"Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate."
"Having wandered some distance among gloomy rocks, I came to the entrance of a great cavern ... Two contrary emotions arose in me: fear and desire--fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there were any marvelous things in it."
"The night is shattered, and the blue stars shiver in the distance."
"Spirit is a land of high white peaks and glittering jewel-like lakes and flowers. Life is sparse and sounds travel great distances."
"Communication has changed so rapidly in the last 20 years, it's almost impossible to predict what might occur even in the next decade. E-mail, which now sends data hurtling across vast distances at the speed of light, has replaced primitive forms of communication such as smoke signals, which sent data hurtling across vast distances at the speed of light."
"Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it will begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that won’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly."
"The distance is nothing when one has a motive."
