“If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?”

Source: Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

As quoted in Precision Shooting : The Trapshooter's Bible‎ (1998) by James Russell, p. 54
Variant: Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye, and deny it.

City Aphorisms, Ninth Selection (1992)

An Essay on the Beautiful
Context: What measures, then, shall we adopt? What machine employ, or what reason consult by means of which we may contemplate this ineffable beauty; a beauty abiding in the most divine sanctuary without ever proceeding from its sacred retreats lest it should be beheld by the profane and vulgar eye? We must enter deep into ourselves, and, leaving behind the objects of corporeal sight, no longer look back after any of the accustomed spectacles of sense. For, it is necessary that whoever beholds this beauty, should withdraw his view from the fairest corporeal forms; and, convinced that these are nothing more than images, vestiges and shadows of beauty, should eagerly soar to the fair original from which they are derived. For he who rushes to these lower beauties, as if grasping realities, when they are only like beautiful images appearing in water, will, doubtless, like him in the fable, by stretching after the shadow, sink into the lake and disappear. For, by thus embracing and adhering to corporeal forms, he is precipitated, not so much in his body as in his soul, into profound and horrid darkness; and thus blind, like those in the infernal regions, converses only with phantoms, deprived of the perception of what is real and true.

Source: The New Moon's Arms (2007), Chapter 2 (p. 72)

Ask Agnetha No. 15, Agnetha Fältskog's YouTube channel (AgnethaOfficial), 16 May 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTKhvSKfMYs