"The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game."

Beecher, Henry Ward on Cynics and Cynicism
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"How like a winter hath my absence been. From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, What old December's bareness everywhere!"

Shakespeare, William on Absence
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"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity."

Santayana, George on Death and Dying
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"The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood."

Stark, Freya on Life and Living
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"We should face reality and our past mistakes in an honest, adult way. Boasting of glory does not make glory, and singing in the dark does not dispel fear."

Hussein, King on Truth
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"Become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see possibilities -- always see them, for they're always there."

Peale, Norman Vincent on Possibilities
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"With their souls of patent leather, they come down the road. Hunched and nocturnal, where they breathe they impose, silence of dark rubber, and fear of fine sand."

Lorca, Federico Garcia on Police
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"We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen."

Merton, Thomas on Failure
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"The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness."

Canetti, Elias on Crime and Criminals
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"Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other."

Bacon, Francis on Fear
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"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."

Nabokov, Vladimir on Existence
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"Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored; dies before thy uncreating word: thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; and universal darkness buries all."

Pope, Alexander on Chaos
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"Still falls the rain -- dark as the world of man, black as our loss -- blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross."

Sitwell, Dame Edith on Rain
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"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."

Plato on Forgiveness
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"The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man's thoughts."

Aragon, Louis on Fantasy
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"Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again."

Arnold, Matthew on Death and Dying
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"My darkness has been filled with the light of intelligence, and behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness."

Keller, Helen on Blindness
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"We follow the mystics. They know where they are going. They, too, go astray, but when they go astray they do so in a way that is mystical, dark, and mysterious."

Kapuscinski, Ryszard on Mystics and Mysticism
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"Of all the things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself --my disgust at her barbarity --clumsiness --darkness --bitter mockery of herself --is the most desolating."

Ruskin, John on Nature
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"Life is indeed darkness save when there is urge, and all urge is blind save when there is knowledge, and all knowledge is vain save when there is work, and all work is empty save when there is love."

Gibran, Kahlil on Futility
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"The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?"

Whitman, Walt on Past
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"Men's private self-worlds are rather like our geographical world's seasons, storm, and sun, deserts, oases, mountains and abysses, the endless-seeming plateaus, darkness and light, and always the sowing and the reaping."

Baldwin, Faith on Men
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"No lying knight or lying priest ever prospered in any age, but especially not in the dark ones. Men prospered then only in following an openly declared purpose, and preaching candidly beloved and trusted creeds."

Ruskin, John on Lies and Lying
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"Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on Reason
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"My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane."

Frost, Robert on Autumn
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"Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind."

Amiel, Henri Frederic on Life and Living
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"People are like stained -- glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within"

Ross, Elizabeth Kubler on Adversity
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"For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known. [I Corinthians]"

Bible on God
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"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."

Thoreau, Henry David on Enlightenment
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"If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death."

Pythagoras on World
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"The 1950s to me is darkness, hidden history, perversion behind most doors waiting to creep out. The 1950s to most people is kitsch and Mickey Mouse watches and all this intolerable stuff..."

Ellroy, James on Twentieth Century
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"I guess I just prefer to see the dark side of things. The glass is always half-empty. And cracked. And I just cut my lip on it. And chipped a tooth."

Garofalo, Janeane on Pessimism
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"Every life has dark tracts and long stretches of somber tint, and no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light, and flings no shadows on the canvas."

Maclaren, Alexander on Difficulties
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"Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls."

Bergman, Ingmar on Cinema
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"Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail."

Navajo, Edward A. on Beauty
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"We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them."

Maeterlinck, Maurice on Loneliness
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"Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things."

Baudrillard, Jean on Television
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"Relationships are like a dance, with visible energy racing back and forth between partners. Some relationships are the slow, dark dance of death."

Dowling, Colette on Relationships
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"Love may be blind, but it can sure find its way around in the dark!"

Unknown, Source on Love
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"Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval."

Mcluhan, Marshall on Obscurity
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