Quotes about Shadows

Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train.

Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel

There was a silence. The evening darkened in the room. Noiselessly and with silver feet the shadows crept in from the garden. The colours faded wearily out of things.

They walked softly, as men do instinctively at night. The lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase. A rising wind made some of the windows rattle.

A library is but the soul's burial-ground. It is the land of shadows.

The earthly desires men cherish are shadows. There is no true happiness in fulfilling them. Why, then, do we continue to pursue joys without substance? Because the pursuit itself has become our only substitute for joy. Unable to rest in anything we achieve, we determine to forget our discontent in a ceaseless quest for new satisfactions. In this pursuit, desire itself becomes our chief satisfaction.

Satan is always content to hide in the shadows of a worldview if he can exploit that worldview to his own ends.

Use the shadows of the born The shapes of the world And pass them before the light Of imagination's birthless ecstasy

But injustice breeds injustice; the fighting with shadows and being defeated by them necessitates the setting up of substances to combat.

We Christian writers must paint evil with the blackest of brushes, not to sow fear, but to call out the monsters to be scattered by our light. If Satan cloaks himself as an angel of white, intent on deceiving the world, any attempt on our parts to minimize evil is only complicit with his strategy... Turn to the light; don't fear the shadows it creates.

And must I now begin to doubt - who never doubted all these years? My heart is stone, and still it trembles. The world I have known is lost in the shadows. Is he from heaven or from hell? And does he know, that granting me my life today, this man has killed me, even so. - Javert

Our joys have shadows. The perfect smile belongs to God alone.