Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them. . . one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. This is what a picture should give us. . . an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace. . . loose conciousness. Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them.
She felt the abyss of disenchantment.
. . . throw roses into the abyss and say: 'here is my thanks to the monster who didn't succeed in swallowing me alive.
Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.
On the top of each peak you are on the edge of the abyss
The bliss of the elect in heaven would not be perfect unless they were able to look across the abyss and enjoy the agonies of their brethren in eternal fire.
All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.
By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.
Despair is deep. An abyss that swallows dreams. A wall at the world's end. Behind it I await death. Because all our work has come to this.
I thought this must be obvious to everyone else, as it seemed obvious to me; and that, if once it became apparent that we were on the edge, all the Great Powers would call a halt and recoil from the abyss.
Before me is the abyss. How can I leap across it? And if I do not leap, how shall I ever be able to reach God?
The whole organization seemed to be in free fall, indulging in a collective fantasy in which experienced colleagues refused to admit that their every movement, every decision that was made and implemented, only led them one step closer to the abyss.
Nietzsche, who you don't spend too much time with after the age of seventeen, did have that one great line about "he who stares into the abyss must know that the abyss also stares into him" and I never really understood that until my friend got killed and you really get your head around the idea of what horror means. It's a truly awful thing, to really, kind of have that understanding of things and when you really peer into that.
. . . see well how it often befalls that to rise to the topmost degree would make it seem that the abyss is on high.
If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.
He laughed a little, in an odd, nervous kind of way. "Because if I don't get going soon, the whole impetus may die--and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.
My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth into light!
The woman had looked into the abyss and then walked out across it.
Beyond is all abyss, eternity, whose end no eye can reach.
The grand canyon which yawns between the writer's concept of what he wants to capture in words and what comes through is a cruel abyss.