 |
| Purple and Gold [Flickr page] |
Before me extends a low hill trembling in yellow brome, and behind the hill, filling the sky, rises an enormous mountain ridge, forested, alive and awesome with brilliant blown lights. I have never seen anything so tremulous and live.
—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
 |
| S Curve [Flickr page] |
You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
—Sam Harris, Free Will
 |
| Upstart [Flickr page] |
One cannot possess the beauty of a landscape. And one soon forgets the self, lost in wonder. Prevented from possessing, the ego withers away for the moment, and the beauty shines unobstructed. Self no longer stands in its way, blocking the view.
—Robert M. Price, The Reason-Driven Life
 |
| Fresh and Distant Photons [Flickr page] |
Go out some night into the woods … and hold up your hand to the sky, making a tiny circle between your thumb and forefinger about the size of a dime. Hold it up to a dark patch of the sky where there are no visible stars. In that dark patch, with a large enough telescope of the type we now have in service today, you could discern perhaps 100,000 galaxies, each containing billions of stars.
—Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing
 |
| Spokane from Riverfront Park [Flickr page] |
When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,—then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream!
—William James, “The Will to Believe”
 |
| Palouse River Canyon [Flickr page] |
It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem.
—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
 |
| Cumulus Clouds at Dusk [Flickr page] |
The world lay altered by the imminence of night, as though a curtain was dropping over it. Yet out on the low rim of the western horizon the sun streamed into the high eastern sky, which held its unearthly light.
—David Guterson, East of the Mountains
 |
| Footprints in the Snow [Flickr page] |
The thoughts of man, in order to be of any real worth, must be free. Under the influence of fear the brain is paralyzed, and instead of bravely solving a problem for itself, tremblingly adopts the solution of another.
—Robert G. Ingersoll, “Lecture on Gods”
———
Click on individual images to enlarge, or check out my most “interesting” photos on Flickr. All are Copyright © 2013-14 Edwin A. Suominen. You may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
