Chartres Quotes

[After viewing the Palace of Electricity at the 1900 Trocadero Exposition in Paris]
[Saint-Gaudens and Matthew Arnold] felt a railway train as power; yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres. ~ Henry Adams

I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of a bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past, I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. ~ James Baldwin

Science in its everyday practice is much closer to art than to philosophy. When I look at Godel's proof of his undecidability theorem, I do not see a philosophical argument. The proof is a soaring piece of architecture, as unique and as lovely as Chartres Cathedral. Godel took Hilbert's formalized axioms of mathematics as his building blocks and built out of them a lofty structure of ideas into which he could finally insert his undecidable arithmetical statement as the keystone of the arch. The proof is a great work of art. It is a construction, not a reduction. It destroyed Hilbert's dream of reducing all mathematics to a few equations, and replaced it with a greater dream of mathematics as an endlessly growing realm of ideas. Godel proved that in mathematics the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts. Every formalization of mathematics raises questions that reach beyond the limits of the formalism into unexplored territory. ~ Freeman Dyson

The peach gown she'd chosen was the color of the sunrise, the rippling watered silk seeming to subtly change from rose to pink to nearly orange in different lights. She'd fallen in love with it at once. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

Lauren closed her eyes, remembering how desperate she had been this morn in Chartres, how she had prayed for divine intervention to stop her wedding.
She had never expected that intervention to be riding a black horse and wielding a sword. ~ Shelly Thacker

The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair. ~ George Will

Her gaze dropped to the right side of his mouth, to the corner of his lip that was permanently pulled into a slight snarl by the edge of the angry scar, and then to the other side of his mouth, to the sensuous curve of his lips. She raised her hand, reaching out to touch that perfect curl. She stilled, her hand hovering, as the sunlight glinted off the ruby ring on her finger. It was a pretty little ring, delicate and made for a woman. In any other circumstances she would've worn it with happiness.
Here, though... Well it was almost a mark of possession, wasn't it?
Iris inhaled and jerked her hand back before she made contact. This man might be her 'husband' now- courtesy of a series of terrible events and his own stubbornness, but he was still a stranger.
A stranger she wasn't even sure she could entirely trust. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation? ~ Barry Lopez

God shall have a starring role in my history of the world. How could it be otherwise? If He exists, then He is responsible for the whole marvellous appalling narrative. If He does not, then the very proposition that He might have killed more people and exercised more minds than anything else. He dominates the stage. In His name has been devised the rack, the thumbscrew, the Iron Maiden, the stake; for Him have people been crucified, flayed alive, fried, boiled, flattened; He has generated the Crusades, the pogroms, the Inquisition and more wars than I can number. But for Him there would not be the St Mathews Passion, the works of Michelangelo and Chartres Cathedral. ~ Penelope Lively

The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin. ~ Cornell Woolrich

One event that is both history and myth is the rain of blood around the year 1000 in Aquitaine and elsewhere in France. Reports exist from the early eleventh century of a blood rain that "fell upon the clothes of many men, and so stained them with gore that they shuddered at the sight of their own garments and tore them off." Fulbert of Chartres wrote that account in a letter to King Robert of France, after the worried king received a report from Duke William V about a rain of blood that fell in Aquitaine. Scientists today believe that historical reports of blood rain may have been due to dust containing iron oxide, ~ Joseph Finley

His nostrils flared just a little bit, and the lines bracketing his mouth grew deeper. He snarled with his beautiful, twisted lips and she thought, half on the edge of falling again, she thought he looked like a demon making love to her. A demon fighting for his life or light or possibly redemption. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

I like the thought that what we are to do on this earth is embellish it for its greater beauty, so that oncoming generations can look back to the shapes we leave here and get the same thrill that I get in looking back at theirs - at the Parthenon, at Chartres Cathedral. ~ Philip Johnson

I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan. ~ Richard Dawkins

We are like dwarfs [the moderns] sitting on the shoulders of giants [the ancients]. Our glance can thus take in more things and reach farther than theirs. It is not because our sight is sharper nor our height greater than theirs; it is that we are carried and elevated by the high stature of the giants. ~ Bernard Of Chartres

I have seen the Virgin
in an appletree at Chartres
And Saint Joan burn
at the Bella Union.
I have seen giraffes in junglejims
their necks like love
wound around the iron circumstances
of the world.
I have seen the Venus Aphrodite
armless in her drafty corridor.
I have heard a siren sing
at One Fifth Avenue.
I have seen the White Goddess dancing
in the Rue des Beaux Arts
on the Fourteenth of July
and the Beautiful Dame Without Mercy
picking her nose in Chumley's. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

That day in Chartres they had passed through town and watched women kneeling at the edge of the water, pounding clothes against a flat, wooden board. Yves had watched them for a long time. They had wandered up and down the old crooked streets, in the hot sun; Eric remembered a lizard darting across a wall; and everywhere the cathedral pursued them. It is impossible to be in that town and not be in the shadow of those great towers; impossible to find oneself on those plains and not be troubled by that cruel and elegant, dogmatic and pagan presence. The town was full of tourists, with their cameras, their three-quarter coats, bright flowered dresses and shirts, their children, college insignia, Panama hats, sharp, nasal cries, and automobiles crawling like monstrous gleaming bugs over the laming, cobblestoned streets. Tourist buses, from Holland, from Denmark, from Germany, stood in the square before the cathedral. Tow-haired boys and girls, earnest, carrying knapsacks, wearing khaki-colored shorts, with heavy buttocks and thighs, wandered dully through the town. American soldiers, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes, leaned over bridges, entered bistros in strident, uneasy, smiling packs, circled displays of colored post cards, and picked up meretricious mementos, of a sacred character. All of the beauty of the town, all the energy of the plains, and all the power and dignity of the people seemed to have been sucked out of them by the cathedral. It was as though the cath ~ James Baldwin

Duke Chartres used to boast that no man could have less real value for character than himself, yet he would gladly give twenty thousand pounds for a good one, because he could immediately make double that sum by means of it. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Do we, mad as we all are after riches, hear often enough from the pulpit the spirit of those words in which Dean Swift, in his epitaph on the affluent and profligate Colonel Chartres, announces the small esteem of wealth in the eyes of God, from the fact of His thus lavishing it upon the meanest and basest of His creatures? ~ Edwin Percy Whipple

His duchess caught the tip of her tongue between her teeth as she carefully poured warm water over his hair. Her lips were very pink. Plump, with a prominent Cupid's bow on the upper one. Her mouth gleamed softly with moisture.
His eyelids dropped as he considered what he wanted to do with that mouth.
She was working soap into his hair now with strong, slim fingers that massaged his scalp.
He clenched his jaw to keep from groaning.
She scrubbed backward through his hair, stroking, pressing, and he found his eyes closing like a lazy cat's. He'd not been touched like this by another since...
Well. Not for a very long time. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

This is a place for ordinary human compassion of the kind that is reconciling ~ Richard Chartres

In until ten, not even on Mardi Gras nights. No one except the girl in the black silk dress, the thin little girl with the short, soft dark hair that fell in a curtain across her eyes. Christian always wanted to brush it away from her face, to feel it trickle through his fingers like rain. Tonight, as usual, she slipped in at nine-thirty and looked around for the friends who were never there. The wind blew the French Quarter in behind her, the night air rippling warm down Chartres Street as it slipped away toward the river, smelling of spice and fried oysters and whiskey and the dust of ancient bones stolen and violated. ~ Poppy Z. Brite

Seeing that picture, for me, was like Chartres Cathedral. ~ Henry Moore

Whoever heard of such a mixture of languages in one army, since there were French, Flemings, Frisians, Gauls, Sayonards, Lotharingians, Allemani, Bavarians, Normans, English, Scots, Aquitanians, Italians, Danes, Apulians, Iberians, Bretons, Greeks and Armenians. ~ Fulcher Of Chartres

Parents who want a fresh point of view on their furniture are advised to drop down on all fours and accompany the nine or ten month old on his rounds. It is probably many years since you last studied the underside of a dining room chair. The ten month old will study this marvel with as much concentration and reverence as a tourist in the Cathedral of Chartres. ~ Selma Fraiberg