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Darkness

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For other uses of "Dark", see Dark (disambiguation).
Have you understood the vast expanse of the earth? Tell me, if you know all of this. In which direction does the light reside? And where is the place of darkness?
~ Book of Job 38 NWT
It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.
It lies behind stars and under hills,
And empty holes it fills.
It comes first and follows after
Ends life, kills laughter.
—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Darkness is the opposite of brightness, and is a relative or total absence of visible light.

Quotes

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  • There was darkness in the beginning, hidden by darkness.
    • Rigveda 10.129.3 , translated and quoted in Hans Hock, Through a glass darkly: Modern racial interpretations vs. textual and general prehistoric evidence on arya and dasa/dasyu in Vedic society. 145-174. Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, interpretation, and ideology, Proceedings of the International Seminar on Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 25-27 October, 1996, ed. by Johannes Bronkhorst and Madhav M. Deshpande. Harvard Oriental Series, Opera Minora, 3. 1999
  • I see skies of blue and clouds of white
    The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
    And I think to myself: what a wonderful world.
  • In brightest day, in blackest night
    No evil shall escape my sight
    Let those who worship evil's might
    Beware my power...Green Lantern's light!
    • Hal Jordan's oath, created by John Broome and Gil Kane
  • Dark as pitch.
  • The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
    The Moon, their Mistress, had expired before;
    The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
    And the clouds perish'd; darkness had no need
    Of aid from them—she was the Universe.
  • Men will seem to see new destructions in the sky. The flames that fall from it will seem to rise in it and to fly from it with terror. They will hear every kind of animals speak in human language. They will instantaneously run in person in various parts of the world, without motion. They will see the greatest splendour in the midst of darkness. O! marvel of the human race! What madness has led you thus! You will speak with animals of every species and they with you in human speech. You will see yourself fall from great heights without any harm and torrents will accompany you, and will mingle with their rapid course.
    • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XX Humorous Writings, as translated by Edward MacCurdy.
  • There's no earthly way of knowing
    Which direction we are going
    There's no knowing where we're rowing
    Or which way the river's flowing
    Is it raining?
    Is it snowing?
    Is a hurricane a-blowing?
    Not a speck of light is showing
    So the danger must be growing
    Are the fires of hell a-glowing?
    Is the grisly reaper mowing?
    Yes, the danger must be growing
    'Cause the rowers keep on rowing
    And they're certainly not showing
    Any signs that they are slowing!
  • On the wide and silent plain, darkening the bright daylight, she turns midday into darkness.
  • Darkness which may be felt.
    • Exodus, 10:21.
  • There was an old woman who lived in a room. And, like all of us, was frightened of the dark. But who discovered in a minute last fragment of her life that there was nothing in the dark that wasn't there when the lights were on. Object lesson for the more frightened amongst us, in or out, of the Twilight Zone.
    • As spoken by Rod Serling in Twilight Zone Nothing in the Dark written by George Clayton Johnson
  • I'm giving you a night call to tell you how I feel
    I want to drive you through the night, down the hills
    I'm gonna tell you something you don't want to hear
    I'm gonna show you where it's dark, but have no fear.
  • Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
    • Martin Luther King, Jr., "Where Do We Go From Here?" as published in Where Do We Go from Here : Chaos or Community? (1967), p. 62.
  • Black and more black the midnight grew,
    Black and more black was the water’s hue ;
    Then a ghastly sound on the silence broke,
    And I thought of the dead beneath the oak.
  • For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness” and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.
  • Lo! darkness bends down like a mother of grief
    On the limitless plain, and the fall of her hair
    It has mantled a world.
    • Joaquin Miller, From Sea to Sea, Stanza 4; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 160-61.
  • I understand that the word ‘occult’ means hidden, but surely that is not meant to be the final state of all this information, hidden forever. I don’t see why there is any need to further obscure things that are actually lucid and bright. Language and strange terminology – to keep them as some private mystery. I think there is too much darkness in magic. I can understand that it is part of the theatre. I can understand Aleister Crowley – who I think was a great intellect that was sometimes let down by his own flair for showmanship — but he did a lot to generate the scary aura of the magician that you find these sad, Crowleyite fucks making a fetish of. The ones who say ‘oh we’re into Aleister Crowley because he was the wickedest man in the world, and we’re also into Charles Manson because we’re bad. And we are middle-class as well, but we’re bad’. There are some people who seek evil – I don’t think there is such a thing as evil – but there are people who seek it as a kind of Goth thing. That just adds to the murk to what to me is a very lucid and flourescent subject. What occultism needs is someone to open the window, it’s too stuffy and it smells. Let’s get some fresh air, throw open the curtains – I can’t go for that posturing, spooky guy stuff. When they wanted me to do Fortean TV it became apparent that they wanted me to be Spooky Bloke. But I’m not actually trying to look spooky. I dress in black because it makes me look less fat, it’s as simple as that. It’s not a gothic flourish. I don’t want to be thought of as a figure of mystery or a master of the occult, surely this is about illumination, casting light on things. I’m an illuminist, that’d do for me.
  • Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light's winning.
  • Haunted trees
    covered behind the curtains of their own leaves
    stare at the dark
    from the fringe of streets.
  • Creation does not cease
    just because there is darkness!
  • Or (the state of a disbeliever) is like the darkness in a vast deep sea, overwhelmed with a great wave topped by a great wave, topped by dark clouds, darkness, one above another, if a man stretches out his hand, he can hardly see it! And he for whom God has not appointed light, for him there is no light.
  • Absolutely have to have dark in order to have light. [...] Gotta have opposites – dark and light, light and dark – continually in a painting. If you have light on light, you have nothing. If you have dark on dark, you basically have nothing. [...] You know, it's like in life: you've gotta have a little sadness once in a while, so you know when the good times come. I'm waiting on the good times now.
  • Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
    That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
    And ere a man had power to say, Behold!
    The jaws of darkness do devour it up.
  • The charm dissolves apace,
    And as the morning steals upon the night,
    Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
    Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
    Their clearer reason.
  • Light must be saved for those moments when the night is dark, when the moon doesn't appear in the sky.
  • It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
    Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.
    It lies behind stars and under hills,
    And empty holes it fills.
    It comes first and follows after
    Ends life, kills laughter.
  • One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
    One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
    In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

See also

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Wikipedia
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