Best 477 quotes in «seeing quotes» category

I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.

I have no recollection of seeing a mercury vapor detector at facilities where mercury was in use.

I’m learning how to see. I don’t know what the reason is, but everything enters into me more deeply and no longer stops at the point where it used to come to an end. I have an inner self that I knew nothing about. Now everything goes into it. I don’t know what happens there.

In later years it would sometimes happen that I’d wake up at night and see the stars so real in the sky and so meaningful in their course, and couldn’t understand how anyone could bring themselves to miss so much of the world.

Infrared satellite imagery, optical telescopes, and the Hubbell space telescope bring vastness within our visual sphere. Electron microscopes let us wander the remote universe of our own cells. But at the middle scale, that of the unaided eye, our senses seem to be strangely dulled. With sophisticated technology, we strive to see what is beyond us, but are often blind to the myriad sparkling facets that lie so close at hand. We thing we're seeing when we've only scratched the surface. Our acuity at this middle scale seems diminished, not by any failing of the eyes, but by the willingness of the mind. Has the power of our devices led us to distrust our unaided eyes? Or have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens.

In order that the concept of substance could originate--which is indispensable for logic although in the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it--it was likewise necessary that for a long time one did not see or perceive the changes in things. The beings that did not see so precisely had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux." At bottom, every high degree of caution in making inferences and every skeptical tendency constitute a great danger for life. No living beings would have survived if the opposite tendency--to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to err and make up things rather than wait, to assent rather than negate, to pass judgment rather than be just-- had not been bred to the point where it became extraordinarily strong.

I love flowers for being flowers, directly. And I love trees for being trees without my thought.

In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there. I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.

I only enjoy what I can see, because I don't feel anything. For example, your new wallpaper. I like it and it can stay, it's quiet and it keeps quiet at least. Luckily I don't have to feel it, just see it.

I see a sacred beautiful art.

I see you in every passing moment.

It is a torture to see people whom you don't like.

It is the eye that discovers the mystery of light, not only the moon and the stars and the vast splendours of the Aurora, but the endless changes the earth undergoes under changing lights.

I've been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But -- and this is the point -- who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.

I see people everywhere disagreeing, who actually agree with each-other, but cannot see that they agree.

It is naive to think you know someone so well. To think that whatever time you have shared in knowing their habits, their history, their stories, their weaknesses, their strengths, their wounds, and deepest corners of their heart could ever sum them up-- is unjust. It is a shame to be unaware of the shifts and changes that happen every day, every moment, right before your eyes. The little crinkles around her eyes that get ever-so-slightly deeper and wiser. The silver linings of her hair. The wonders of time and how they show their presence in such ways. You may think that a flower is simply a flower. A flower that looks and smells just as simply as it always has. Or that the ocean is simply salt water and blue. The flower is always moving, changing, blossoming, and giving life to the birds and the bees. The ocean's tides rise and fall with the phases of the moon. The currents change direction. And depending on how the sun hits the water, the colors and shades of blue are in fact, infinite. Everything around you and everyone is always changing. Take time to smell the roses. Take time to watch the tide. Take time to see your love with new eyes. It would be a shame to miss it.

It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the valley like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, all the leaves of the hardwoods from here to Hudson’s Bay. It was as if the season’s colors were draining away like lifeblood, as if the year were molting and shedding. The year was rolling down, and a vital curve had been reached, the tilt that gives way to headlong rush. And when the monarch butterflies had passed and were gone, the skies were vacant, the air poised. The dark night into which the year was plunging was not a sleep but an awakening, a new and necessary austerity, the sparer climate for which I longed. The shed trees were brittle and still, the creek light and cold, and my spirit holding its breath.

I trust only you and the dark always to look at me so honestly.

It’s an already inside outside, The philosophers say it’s the soul But it’s not the soul: it’s the animal or the man itself In its way of existing.

It's tempting to think of red for sun," she said, "but it has to be just a dash, not much. More of a dark orange and a hint of brown. And then white on yellow on white. Not bright white,' she said. 'The kind of white that makes you squint, but in a softer way...' 'Go look at fire for a while. Go spend some time with fire.' Looking at fire was interesting, I have to admit. I sat with a candle for a couple hours. It has these stages of color: the white, the yellow, the red, the tiny spot of blue I'd heard mentioned but never noticed.

it was like trying to see a shadow in the dark.

I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can’t think about them. I live with trees. There are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and in addition, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down, shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach.

I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.

Love can see the limitless beauty within self and within others.

Martin Buber tells this tale: “Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi Elimelekh that evenings he saw the angel who rolls away the light before the darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light. ‘Yes,’ said Rabbi Elimelekh, ‘in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don’t see these things any more.

I've traveled. All over. I've never seen anything like you. How could anything be put together like you? Do you know how beautiful you are? Have you looked at yourself?' 'I'm looking now.

I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.

I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the world’s coasts the sea tides would be springing strong. The air itself also has lunar tides; I lay still. Could I feel in the air an invisible sweep and surge, and an answering knock in the lungs? Or could I feel the starlight? Every minute on a square mile of this land one ten thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and arms, tapping and nudging as particles, pulsing and stroking as waves?

Listening leads us more inside ourselves whereas seeing leads us more outside—the work of seeing itself, that is. And, therefore, we will be far more blessed with eternal life by the power of listening than by the power of sight. The act of listening allows me to hear the eternal Word spoken with me, whereas sight leads me astray, to what is outside myself. In listening, I suffer (or allow); in seeing, I work.

Living in new shapes, reshapes our thinking

Looking is only for those who cannot see.

Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.

Look upon the world with loving eyes and the reflection everyone sees will contain love.

Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now, and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection, that you can truly love them. Otherwise, it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire, not as he or she is in themselves.

Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph. I've always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at.

My eyes are my greatest sin.

Maybe you shake your head, but let me learn a lesson right now: plenty knowledge is in this world. Enough knowledge that you can pick and refuse. And if you want, you can refuse to know plenty things, don't care how true those things be. I know things you does not know, and things you will never know. And it is sake of that - sake of this knowledge - that people have looked on me and called me old fool or crazy. They treat me like I is retarded. Imagine that. I is the idiot because I know what they don't know.

My love, you are driving the entire world mad. The nightingales are committing suicide one by one out of jealousy of your voice. The roses took one glance at your beauty and folded themselves from shame. The trees now only whisper your name and the sky hasn’t stopped crying since you looked up. Have pity on us, my love. We have already broken all the mirrors and glass out of fear that you will forget us and fall in love with yourself once you see what we all cannot stop seeing.

Nature never remembers, that’s why she’s beautiful.

Night doesn’t fall for my eyes But my idea of the night is that it falls for my eyes. Beyond my thinking and having any thoughts The night falls concretely And the shining of stars exists like it had weight.

O God open our eyes to see the wonders of your holy word.

Mist lies over the river like the icy breath of winter angels. Darkness gathers round... and it is beautiful. Thank you for this life, this death, whatever it is you are that makes us finally see.

No matter where you go, no matter where you hide, the world sees you from anywhere and from any angle!

Nothing at all reminds us of something else when we pay attention to it. Each thing only reminds us of what it is And it’s only what nothing else is. The fact that it’s it separates it from every other thing. (Everything’s nothing without another thing that’s not it).

Now I sense the perfume of flowers like seeing a new thing. I know they smell just as well as I know I existed. They’re things known from the outside. But now I know with my breathing from the back of my head.

Once people see you cry, it's like they own part of you. It's like you ripped a hole in yourself, and they saw through whatever armor you had on, got a good long view of all the screaming alien goop underneath.

One sees clearly only with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eye.

One of the joys of shopping is browsing.

One who walks in love sees the world through the envelope of their mission.

People don't see others outside of their class group; they are practically invisible.