Best 477 quotes in «seeing quotes» category

Something changed in part of reality — my knees and my hands. What science has knowledge for this? The blind man goes on his way and I don’t make any more gestures. It’s already not the same time, or the same people, or anything the same. This is being real.

Sometimes I know things before they happen. Sometimes I can see a scene in my head. Like watching a movie, and then it will happen. I think, did I make it happen? Or did I just see it somehow?

Sometimes I take my glasses off to see differently from other people. Colours and words swim into each other, meanings change on the page. In the distance, everything becomes a pastel blur. There is a kind of restfulness in not seeing well that the clear-sighted will never know.

Sometimes in the darkness you can see more clearly.

Taco Hidde Bakker: (quoting a sentence from Schles' book "Oculus") Further on you write, decidedly, “Seeing is not knowing. Recognition is not knowledge”. […] Muses are the origin of knowledge. Almost everything one knows and is able to know nowadays, comes from hearsay, isn’t based on one’s own experiences or witnessing of events. Most of us don’t even directly witness historically decisive events (or what have come to be portrayed as such by the media) during our lifetimes. By means of the mechanisms of complex (visual) representation networks, we are second-order or even third-order witnesses. If we were to consider photography sui generis, then it is a Muse. It is virtually omnipresent, it sees everything, transmits visual evidence to people all over the globe, and enlargers their body of knowledge.

Tactics and Checkmate in 1 move, show me some interesting stuff about chess... so far I can say that I see the chessboard different.

The amorous shepherd has lost his staff, And his sheep are straying on the hillside, And he didn’t even play the flute he brought to play because he was thinking so much. No one came to him or went away. He never found his staff again. Others, cursing at him, gathered his sheep for him. No one had loved him, in the end. When he got up from the hillside and the false truth, he saw everything: The great valleys full of the same green as always, The great distant mountains, more real than any feeling, All reality, with the sky and the air and the fields that exist, is present. (And once again the air, that he’d missed for so long, entered coolly into his lungs) And he felt that the air was opening again, but with pain, a liberty in his chest. (7/10/1930)

Taking personal responsibility is not about being "responsible" — it is about seeing your truth and evolving.

The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated. Living is moving; time is a live creek bearing changing lights. As I move, or as the world moves around me, the fullness of what I see shatters. “Last forever!” Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless. But there is more to the present than a series of snapshots. We are not merely sensitized film; we have feelings, a memory for information and an eidetic memory for the imagery of our pasts. Our layered consciousness is a tiered track for an unmatched assortment of concentrically wound reels. Each one plays out for all of life its dazzle and blur of translucent shadow-pictures; each one hums at every moment its own secret melody in its own unique key. We tune in and out. But moments are not lost. Time out of mind is time nevertheless, cumulative, informing the present. From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt- older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath. But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We keep waking from a dream we can’t recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees.

The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the little backyard was filled with the little rainbows as the sun touched the dew.

The eye you see is not an eye because you see it; it is an eye because it sees you.

The eye of a man is never satisfied with seeing.

The eye of a man is never satisfied with what it sees.

The greatest joy in traveling is seeing where you end up.

The more one thinks, the less one sees.

The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there. Books about birds show pictures of the peregrine, and the text is full of information. Large and isolated in the gleaming whiteness of the page, the hawk stares back at you, bold, statuesque, brightly coloured. But when you have shut the book, you will never see that bird again. Compared with the close and static image, the reality will seem dull and disappointing. The living bird will never be so large, so shiny-bright. It will be deep in landscape, and always sinking farther back, always at the point of being lost. Pictures are waxworks beside the passionate mobility of the living bird.

The man held himself still and turned his milk-flooded eyes on her. Fin felt something like vertigo and knew that, though blind, he was seeing. He wasn’t looking at her or past her. He was looking into her. And what he saw, he judged. “Is very good.

The most profound state of awareness comes from being devoted to your present circumstances, absorbing the sorrows and joys of others, so that you may see yourself within them, which in actuality is you.

The prophet is the eye of the people.

There is no greater success than turning your true passion into a dream, and seeing its reality come to manifestation.

The source calls to you. Find a quiet place and listen for the voice of creation. Look upon the horizon and see the future of your new life, where you are again a natural soul living in joy and peace.

The sight of a castle does not necessarily means that there is a king.

The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return form the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth. Ailinon, alleluia!

These three things give meaning to life: dreams and aspirations which inspires confidence and direct actions and steps in the day, a person’s ability to not just look but see distinctively, and a real and robust action with tenacity which make dreams realities. So many people sleep and they only sleep! So many people wake up and they don’t see anything in the day from dawn to dusk! When you close your eyes, dream! When you open your eyes, see! When you take a step, take a definite action with the right attitude!

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game

They were the truth, so far as I can see." "But you cannot see very far, and what you do see you do not understand. You do not know the truth.

...they never see what they're too much of a hurry to look for

Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings…They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn’t that have been a sight to see?

Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

Those who have eyes…do not know their happiness.

Though my eyes cannot see beyond what I can see, I can see beyond what I cannot see

Through love, you see the whole world, not just people, differently.

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what? I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. “For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,” says Ruysbroeck, “and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else.” But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred, it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn’t catch the consonant that shaped it into sense.

To look is important. We look to immediate things and out of immediate necessities to the future, coloured by the past. Our seeing is very limited and our eyes are accustomed to near things. Our look is as bound by time-space as our brain. We never look, we never see beyond this limitation; we do not know how to look through and beyond these fragmentary frontiers. But the eyes have to see beyond them, penetrating deeply and widely, without choosing, without shelter; they have to wander beyond man-made frontiers of ideas and values and to feel beyond love. Then there is a benediction which no god can give.

To see the world as it is, hide yourself from the world, because when you show yourself to the world, the world will behave differently! And do the same thing to know the people as they are!

To see in the dark, close your eyes.

Ugliness sees ugliness; beauty sees beauty.

Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven, the brightest oriole fades into leaves. These disappearances stun me into stillness and concentration; they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift, ... For a week last September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the back of the house. One day I went out to investigate the racket: I walked up to a tree, an Osage orange, and a hundred birds flew away. They simply materialized out of the tree. I saw a tree, then a whisk of color, then a tree again. I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds took flight. Not a branch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparently weightless as well as invisible. Or, it was as if the leaves of the Osage orange had been freed from a spell in the form of red-winged blackbirds; they flew from the tree, caught my eye in the sky, and vanished. When I looked again at the tree the leaves had reassembled as if nothing had happened. Finally I walked directly to the trunk of the tree and a final hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, and vanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? The Osage orange, unruffled, looked just as it had looked from the house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirds cried from its crown. I looked downstream where they flew, and they were gone. Searching, I couldn't spot one. I wandered downstream to force them to play their hand, but they'd crossed the creek and scattered. One show to a customer. These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees.

Unless we close our eyes we are always deceived.

Unless you see it, it isn’t there, though it is there!

Water’s water and that’s why it’s beautiful.

We all know the true beauty of people everywhere, because we have all looked into the eyes of children, and saw ourselves looking back.

We always look for everything in the immediate proximity, that is a mistake.

We are not great connoisseurs of the two twilights. We miss the dawning, exclusably enough, by sleeping through it, and are as much strangers to the shadowless welling-up of day as to the hesitant return of consciousness in our slowly waking selves. But our obliviousness to evening twilight is less understandable. Why do we almost daily ignore a spectacle (and I do not mean sunset but rather the hour, more or less, afterward) that has a thousand tonalities, that alters and extends reality, that offers, more beautifully than anything man-made, a visual metaphor or peace? To say that it catches us at busy or tired moments won't do; for in temperate latitudes it varies by hours from solstice to solstice. Instead I suspect that we shun twilight because if offers two things which, as insecurely rational beings, we would rather not appreciate: the vision of irrevocable cosmic change (indeed, change into darkness), and a sense of deep ambiguity—of objects seeming to be more, less, other than we think them to be. We are noontime and midnight people, and such devoted camp-followers of certainly that we cannot endure seeing it mocked and undermined by nature. There is a brief period of twilight of which I am especially fond, little more than a moment, when I see what seems to be color without light, followed by another brief period of light without color. The earlier period, like a dawn of night, calls up such sights as at all other times are hidden, wistful half-formless presences neither of day nor night, that draw up with them similar presences in the mind.

We can give happiness a chance: happiness is learnable. Life is a choice and happiness is a question of focusing, hearing and seeing the right things behind the appearances. It is a matter of finding out, differencing worthiness and irrelevance, connectedness and distantness, warmth and aloofness, brightness and dimness. Happiness is the lucky potential to steer friskily along the cliffs of the unknown avoiding the obstacles of narcissism and conceit. ( " Happiness blowing in the wind. " )

We keep seeing certain things all our life, yet seldom do we notice them!

We see the world as we are.

The very small quantum world, it seems, is a mixture of possibilities. The quantum fields to which all particles belong are the sum of these possibilities and, somehow, one possibility is chosen out of all the existing ones just by seeing it, just by the very act of detecting it, whenever one tries to probe a particle's nature. Nobody knows why or how this happens.

Well, not everyone believes these things exist. The things we see are not common; they should not be common knowledge. It is like the story of Santa Claus. You and I know he does not exist -- that he is a metaphor. You know this because you are a special child; you sought to discover the truth yourself. But all of the other children do not know that yet. And we've discussed that you should not tell them the truth because it is not their time to hear it. It would make them very sad without good reason. Just so, it is better for us that we do not tell people about these extra things we see." "When will they figure it out? When can I talk about it?" "Some of them will never know." Pappou paused. "They must never know. Because they will think we are different, and people sometimes do bad things to people whom they consider to be different." Lexi's legs stopped swinging. "Why?" "Why, indeed." The old man sat for a moment, his elbows propped on his knees and his chin resting on his fist. "Perhaps to make us appreciate the nicer people all the more.

We’re so used to just glancing at the environment through the eyes of the past that we’re frequently not certain if we are in fact paying attention or if we merely think that we’re paying attention. Dynamic meditation in everyday existence involves the act of truthfully seeing. Many of us have changed some aspect of our appearance only to have this go unnoticed by friends. Perhaps you’ve shaved off a mustache, added a tattoo, or altered your hairstyle, but your acquaintances failed to initially notice. In such a case, your friends were looking at their environment through the eyes of the past instead of actually seeing what was taking place in the present.