Finding the Sublime

Anything which elevates the mind is sublime.
Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty,
are all sublime.
– John Ruskin

To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.
– Eleanor Catton

Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle,
and cemented by time.
– Mary Wollstonecraft

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
T.S. Eliot

What are the scenes of nature that elevate the mind
and produce the sublime sensation?
…the hoary mountain, the solitary lake,
the aged forest and torrent falling over rocks.
– Hugh Blair, lecture notes from 1783.

Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless,
so that the mind in the presence of the sublime,
attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the
failure but pleasure in contemplating the
immensity of the attempt.
– Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

The value of landscapes would henceforth be decided not solely on the basis of formal aesthetic criteria (the harmony of colours, for example, or the arrangement of lines) or even economic or practical concerns, but rather according to the power of places to arouse the mind to sublimity.
– Edmund Burke

In the built environment shape, size, scale, proportion, texture, color, and light work together to sublime effect.

Greatly begin.
Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime.
Not failure, but low aim is crime.
-James Russell Lowell

Four sublime states of mind  taught by the Buddha:
 Loving-kindness
Compassion
Sympathetic Joy
Equanimity

These images are available as fine art prints.  
For information:  prints@stevemccurry.com

To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
– William Wordsworth

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