Shutting out Quotes

“The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of my world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as their own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other moments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed this thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow.”

“Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth.”

“Shutting out your problems does not dismiss them. Ignorance is not bliss. On the contrary, it creates an opportunity for those problems to grow.”

“The five senses offer us five different ways of shutting out reality. What is intuition and what does it perceive?”

“Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.”

“Any life truly lived is a risky business and if one puts up too many fences against the risks one ends by shutting out life itself.”

“By shutting out the real world we can live peacefully in ours. We know that a world without pain is a world without feeling… But a world without feeling is a world without pain.”

“When men learnt to talk in the beginning of the civilised word they used language not as a means of communication alone but as a means of excluding others--using it as a way of setting themselves apart and shutting out strangers.”

“When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?”