Gutzon Borglum Quotes

The sea has this contradictory quality, that the more you see of it, the more it overwhelms the eye and disappears in its own brightness. Like a flame, whose meaning is light but whose centre is dark, it demands to be undefined.

For me, the reason why people go to a mountaintop or go to the edge of the ocean is to look at something larger than themselves. That feeling of awe, of going to a cathedral, it's all about feeling lost in something bigger than oneself. To me, that's the definition of spectacle.

I had never seen an ocean before I came to Mumbai, something that now we take for granted. But the first time I stood in front of the ocean, it affected me for a week. I had never seen something as enormous. It consumed me completely.

If you think of feelings you have when you are awed by something - for example, knowing that elements in your body trace to exploded stars - I call that a spiritual reaction, speaking of awe and majesty, where words fail you.

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.

I went to the Grand Canyon with my family when I was about 8 years old, and I had a very blah experience. I think the scale of it is too huge - you don't appreciate it.

The vastness of Russia devours us.

Look at the sky; remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity in order to see the smallness of yourself.

I'm very conscious of trying to make something epic out of something small and ordinary.

What I'm dealing with is so vast and great that it can't be called the truth. It's above the truth.

You feel like an ant contemplating Chicago.

I think of Canada, first and foremost, in terms of space. The amount of space available is breathtaking.

How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.

The world stretches before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

I do like large entrances, but this was a little too large.

The massive bulk of the earth does indeed shrink to insignificance in comparison with the size of the heavens.

I've seen the majestic beauty of nature and the overwhelming perfection of it. To me, there's nothing closer to God than that.

There is a wide, yawning black infinity. In every direction, the extension is endless; the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce.

Sometimes, if you wander long enough out-of-doors, you look up and find yourself in a suddenly devastating place: on a glittering slab of granite, say, hanging a thousand feet above a mountain lake.

All kingdoms look small through an airplane window - little dominions built on quicksand. But looking up from the ground, where most of us stand, they're rather impressive.

I'll go out at night and look up at the stars and think, 'How ridiculously inconsequential I am in the scheme of things.'

At Wembley, everything is bigger, wider; the atmosphere is different.

'Flower' is about the sublime.

You are the sky. Everything else - it’s just the weather.