quotations about seeing
He who sees with the eye believes with the heart.
LODOVICO ARIOSTO
attributed, Day's Collacon
Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time; in its right, authentic colors; without making comparisons.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Journal of Arnold Bennett
After all, the true seeing is within.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
Men are born with two eyes, but with one tongue, in order that they should see twice as much as they say.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The age, wherein he lived was dark; but he
Could not want sight, who taught the world to see.
JOHN DENHAM
Todd's Johnson
To learn to see -- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Twilight of the Idols
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
Do not look too far for you will see nothing.
DEJAN STOJANOVIC
The Sun Watches the Sun
See and to be seen.
BEN JONSON
Epithalamion
Being is seeing in the human dimension.
STEPHEN R. COVEY
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
People are forever watching things. They should be seeing. I see the things I look at. I am a see-er.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS
The Wise Man's Fear
Modern life's technology, of course, jams a lot of bright lights into eyeballs that are staring at electronic screens. The technique of averted vision isn't something that comes naturally in these settings. The notion that seeing is a skill seems pretty weird but it is, indeed, very much a skill.
ED STEPHENS JR.
"The third galaxy", Saipan Tribune, August 25, 2017
Seeing is an integrating activity. What you see is fixed in a moment; sight is a perception of depth and relationship, but not one of time and articulation.
JAMES STONE GOODMAN
"What's the blessing, what's the curse", St. Louis Jewish Light, August 17, 2017
None is so blind as he who sees too much.
PHILIP MOELLER
Helena's Husband
Eyes sense what mind sees.
TOBA BETA
My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
People intuitively believe that seeing is a matter only of opening one's eyes. Frequently, people fail to perceive very major things happening right in front of our eyes, a phenomenon known "perceptual blindness".
KADE HAWKINS
Breaking Israel News, May 16, 2017
Many people have never learned to see the beauty of flowers, especially those that grow unnoticed. For instance, when you walk outside and look down at your feet, you may see tiny flowers nestled in the moss and clover hiding under a curled fern. Most people just step on them. I paint them.
ERIKA JUST
Flowers
We look, look, look perpetually while awake, yet few see half they look at.... How many of us have passed along a street or been anywhere ninety-nine times without seeing something always there, which we saw the hundredth time. Our eyes, too, have rested on it, yet we have not noticed it. Or even if we have, we barely observed its existence, whereas many curious things about it escaped cognizance.
ORSON SQUIRE FOWLER
Memory and Intellectual Improvement Applied to Self-Education and Juvenile Instruction
And if thou sayest that sight impedes the security and subtlety of mental meditation, by reason of which we penetrate into divine knowledge, and that this impediment drove a philosopher to deprive himself of his sight, I answer that the eye, as lord of the senses, performs its duty in being an impediment to the confusion and lies of that which is not science but discourse, by which with much noise and gesticulation argument is constantly conducted; and hearing should do the same, feeling, as it does, the offense more keenly, because it seeks after harmony which devolves on all the senses. And if this philosopher deprived himself of his sight to get rid of the obstacle to his discourses, consider that his discourse and his brain were a party to the act, because the whole was madness. Now could he not have closed his eyes when this frenzy came upon him, and have kept them closed until the frenzy consumed itself? But the man was mad, the discourse insane, and egregious the folly of destroying his eyesight.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
He will see most without who has the best eyes within; and he who only sees with his bodily organs sees but the surface.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit