Quotes about blind
page 4

“Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside…”

Martin Amis book London Fields

Source: London Fields

Love

“A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.”

Sam Harris Letter to a Christian Nation

Source: 2000s, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), p. 32

Truth, Feeling, Sense

“Feminism, coveting social power, is blind to women’s cosmic sexual power.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Rape and Modern Sex War, p. 52

Women

“Too much of anything could destroy you, Simon thought. Too much darkness could kill, but too much light could blind.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Light

“I was quiet, but I was not blind.”

Jane Austen book Mansfield Park

Source: Mansfield Park

“A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Book III, Ch. 5
Attributed

Marriage, Anniversary, Wedding, For Him

“There was something peculiarly gratifying about shouting in a blind rage until your words ran out. Of course, the aftermath was less pleasant. Once you'd told everyone you hated them and not to come after you, where exactly did you go?”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Hate, Rage

“Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.”

Lev Grossman The Magicians

Source: The Magicians

People, World, Dead

“The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness.”

Gregory Maguire book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Men, Stupidity

“Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will. Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was — which was ungodly and inhuman. Ben Franklin called it what it was when he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

PENN Address (2004)
Source: U2 By U2

Children, People, Age

“Little Fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance,
And drink, and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

The Fly, st. 1–3
1790s, Songs of Experience (1794)

Art, Drink, Singing, Dance

“She's sent the crows out to blind the guests coming for dinner!"

What?"

She's BLINDING THE GUESTS COMING FOR DINNER!"

Well, that's one way to avoid having to dust, I suppose.”

Gregory Maguire (1954) Novelist

Way

“I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Men, Beauty, Feeling

“A blind man can see what she feels for you and you for her. Your souls are not merely entwined; they are fused.”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

Feeling, Soul

“I taught him, 'he quavered, "to trust in love. I said:'when love comes, that is reality.' I said: 'Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.”

E.M. Forster book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View

Love, Understanding, Reality, Passion

“Am I blind?" Will's voice floated out of the darkness, tinged with annoyance. "I'm not going to be at all pleased if you've blinded me, Henry.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

“Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus, she blinds us all, that fatal madness—she with those delicate feet of hers, never touching the earth, gliding over the heads of men to trap us all. She entangles one man, now another.”

Homér Iliad

Source: The Iliad

Men, Daughters, Madness

“Somehow it seems wrong to photograph a blind person. It’s like stealing something valuable they don’t even know they own.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Source: Phoenix

Personality

“Derek picked the spot? Had he been hoping I'd be blinded by the morning sun and stumble off the edge?”

Kelley Armstrong The Awakening

Source: The Awakening

Hope, Sun

“His smile was like lightning in the darkness, blinding and beautiful and mysterious, and I wanted him so badly it was physically painful.”

Sylvia Day book Bared to You

Source: Bared to You

Pain, Smile, Beauty

“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”

James Baldwin If Beale Street Could Talk

Source: If Beale Street Could Talk

Love, Indifference

“anger based on calculated reason is more dangerous than anger based on blind hate”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

Hate, Anger

“He decided there was no point in telling her he'd looked in the fridge and seen none of these things. There'd just be some variation of his mother's standard crack about Male Refrigeration Blindness Syndrome.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: The Search

“No hard feelings about that time in the Crucible when you mixed my salts and I was nearly blind for a day. No. No, really, drink up!”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

Feeling, Drink, Time

“All kings are blind. The good ones see this and use more than their eyes to lead.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Avenged

“The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.”

Anaïs Nin book House of Incest

Source: House of Incest

Mood

“Seek and see all the marvels around you. You will get tired of looking at yourself alone, and that fatigue will make you deaf and blind to everything else. - Don Juan”

Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) Peruvian-American author

Source: The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

“They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them of their blindness.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Apology for Smectymnuus (1642), section VIII
Source: An apology for Smectymnuus with the reason of church-government by John Milton ...
Context: So little care they of beasts to make them men, that by their sorcerous doctrine of formalities, they take the way to transform them out of Christian men into judaizing beasts. Had they but taught the land, or suffered it to be taught, as Christ would it should have been in all plenteous dispensation of the word, then the poor mechanic might have so accustomed his ear to good teaching, as to have discerned between faithful teachers and false. But now, with a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness; just as the Pharisees their true fathers were wont, who could not endure that the people should be thought competent judges of Christ’s doctrine, although we know they judged far better than those great rabbis: yet “this people,” said they, “that know not the law is accursed.”

People

“There was something peculiarly gratifying about shouting in a blind rage until your words ran out.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Rage

“(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness). Familiarity can blind you too.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

World

“He's gonna be fine," I confirmed.
Can we see him?" Iggy asked.
Ig, I hate to break it to you, but you're blind.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: School's Out—Forever

Hate

“Are you up? Dressing? (Astrid)
No. I’m pissing on your rug. What do you think I’m doing? (Zarek)
I’m blind. For all I know you really are peeing on my rug, which is a very nice rug incidentally, so I hope you’re kidding. (Astrid)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Dance with the Devil

Source: Dance with the Devil

Hope, Thinking

“Not blind opposition to progress, but opposition to blind progress…”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

“I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Source: The Count of Monte Cristo

Happiness, Thinking

“Blindness separates people from things;
deafness separates people from people.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

People

“Love -- not dim and blind but so far-seeing that it can glimpse around corners, around bends and twists and illusion; instead of overlooking faults love seesthem to the secret inside.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: Salt of the Air

Love, Secret

“I want to keep sleeping, but the sun outside my window has other ideas: First blind her. Then jab her eyeballs with scorching-hot daggers.”

Natasha Friend (1972) American writer

Source: Lush

Idea, Sleep, Sun

“To shut you eyes is to guess nothing of blindness.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

“Love is blind,” Harriet quipped.

“But not illiterate,” Elizabeth retorted.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: A Night Like This

Love

“Great, they give blind kids guns," I said, trying to lessen his horror. "I don't even let Iggy have a gun. Usually.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Angel

“Love, Allie concluded, wasn't blind, it simply saw alternate dimensions.”

Neal Shusterman book Everfound

Source: Everfound

Love

“Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

“We are only as blind as we want to be.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

“one must not allow the clock and the calender to blind him to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle --and mystery”

Robin S. Sharma (1965) Canadian self help writer

Source: The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams Reaching Your Destiny

Life

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.”

Joan D. Vinge (1948) American writer

Death

“I took a deep breath and said: “I fell in love with a vampire.”

And like that, I was blinded by light.”

Richelle Mead book Silver Shadows

Source: Silver Shadows

Love, Light

“I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Feeling, Time

“Pity is an emotion that can get you killed. The only thing more dangerous is blind hate, and maybe love.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Guilty Pleasures

Source: Guilty Pleasures

Love, Hate

“To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

World

“Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Love, Understanding, Passion, Personality

“Can I come in?
No! I'm in a towel!
I'm blind!”

James Patterson (1947) American author

“It is better to be blind than to see things from only one point of view.”

Sabrina Jeffries (1960) American writer

“But hands are sacred things. Touch is personal, fingers of love, feelers of blind eyes, tongues of those who cannot talk…”

Keri Hulme book The Bone People

Source: The Bone People

Love, Personality

“Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me.”

Lois McMaster Bujold A Civil Campaign

Source: A Civil Campaign

Light

“I roll onto my side and stare out the venetian blinds at the blue sky beyond. After a few minutes I'm lulled into a sort of peace. The sky, the sky--same as it always was.”

Sara Gruen book Water for Elephants

Source: Water for Elephants

Peace

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot… for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

“A nod is as good as a wink to a blind badger.”

Louise Rennison (1951–2016) British writer

Source: Away Laughing on a Fast Camel

“How did you become blind, uh, Jeff is it?"
Yeah, Jeff. Well, I looked directly at the sun, you know, the way they always tell you not to. If only I had listened.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: School's Out—Forever

Way, Sun

“Omnipotent not omniscient. We are frequently blinded by how much we see.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Bloodfever

“I’m going to be exposed, aren’t I? (Acheron)
I don’t know. You planning on dropping your pants around me? If so, warn me first. I don’t want to go blind. (Savitar)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

“I'm not going to be at all pleased if you've blinded me, Henry.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

“If we do an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we will be a blind and toothless nation.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

“Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears.'
Well, she has opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say she blinds people. What she does is the contrary-she fastens their eyelids open, so they're never again in the blessed darkness.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

People, Tear

“There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.”

Paul Virilio (1932–2018) French philosopher

Dreams

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

Jonathan Haidt (1963) American psychologist

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)

Fate, People, World, Fight

““Fool. There is no why. The very word is a semantic fallacy. Ask me how and I can lay out for you cause and effect, one thing leading to another, the alcohol acting on a grieving man’s mind, the door inadequately guarded, the people within isolated from the common lot of humanity by the dreadful secret of their ancestry.”
He rattled his glass.
Nathan refilled it.
Faust drank. “But to ask why,” he continued, “implies that things happen for a purpose, and they do not. There is no purpose, no direction, no guidance to events. Nothing means anything. The world is a howling desert of meaningless, and reason is useless before it. There is only blind event.”
He stared off into the bleak landscapes of the future while Nathan refilled his glass and refilled his glass and refilled his glass.
He saw so clearly now, without delusion or hope. It was a crystal night of the soul.”

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 19, “Ashes” (pp. 327-328)

People, Alcohol, Secret, World

“The United States, it is apparent even to the blind, is a nightmare of contradictions.”

Ferdinand Lundberg America's 60 Families

America's 60 Families, p. 5 (Vanguard Press, 1938)

“Her face was that of a boy gang-leader, smooth with the innocence of one who, by the same quirk as blinds a man to the mystery of whistling or riding a bicycle, has never mastered the art of affection or compassion or properly learned the moral dichotomy.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

Art, Boy, Learning

“The blonde lead the blind, but now I being to see”

Tomas Kalnoky (1980) American musician

“Without “big data”, you are blind and deaf and in the middle of a freeway.”

Geoffrey Moore (1946) American business writer

Geoffrey Moore, title of book chapter in: The Business Book, 2014. Dorling Kindersley Ltd, p. 316

“We need more co-ordinated efforts to drive this out of our society. More prosecutions. No more turning a blind eye on the false basis of cultural sensitivities.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

2010s, 2015, Speech on (20 July 2015)

Effort, Falseness

“We lived in a large wooden house, with one room succeeding another [Zadkine, recalling in this quote his childhood's days in Smolensk, Russia]. The house was at the end of a blind alley. On one side were a beautiful garden and an orchard. In the summer there was an atmosphere of fragrance and peace. A large room with three windows looked out into the courtyard. Bookshelves along the walls with books and more books; a black table and six ugly Viennese chairs, also black, and in the center of the bare, inhospitable table, a sort of vase in coloured plaster representing a hand holding a goblet. It was the only piece of sculpture in the house!”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

As quoted in: 'The artist, his life and his epoch' (excerpt), Ionel Jianou, 1964; for the Zadkine Research Center https://www.zadkine.com/writing 1960 - 1968

Books, Peace, Beauty, Quotes

“Only an unashamed dogmatist would dare to assert that the issue has finally been resolved now, in favor of the view that, outside logic or mathematics, the method of modern science is the only method to employ in seeking knowledge. The dogmatist who made this assertion would have to be more than ashamed. He would have to blind himself to the fact that his own assertion was not established by the experimental method, nor made as an indisputable conclusion of mathematical reasoning or of purely logical analysis.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Mathematics, Knowledge, Science

“The point is that we are among those who cannot get their mouths around all the little Yeses that add up to tacit acceptance of a world run by crackpot realists and subject to blind drift. And that, you see, is something to which we do belong; we belong to those who are still capable of personally rejecting. Our minds are not yet captive.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

Source: Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954), p. 185.

World, Personality

“On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.”
At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus, qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti, quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint, obcaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa, qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio. nam libero tempore, cum soluta nobis est eligendi optio, cumque nihil impedit, quo minus id, quod maxime placeat, facere possimus, omnis voluptas assumenda est, omnis dolor repellendus. temporibus autem quibusdam et aut officiis debitis aut rerum necessitatibus saepe eveniet, ut et voluptates repudiandae sint et molestiae non recusandae. itaque earum rerum hic tenetur a sapiente delectus, ut aut reiciendis voluptatibus maiores alias consequatur aut perferendis doloribus asperiores repellat.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Ends of Good and Evil), Book I, section 33; Translation by H. Rackham (1914)

Men, Pain, Pleasure, Business

“Normally, anyone disreputable enough to flatly affirm such positive proclamations without adequate support would lose the respect of his peers and be accused of outright fraud; anyone but a religious advocate that is. When allegedly holy men do the exact same thing, then its not called fraud anymore. Its called “revealed truth” instead. That’s quite a double-standard, innit? Like when some minister gets on stage at one of those stadium-sized churches -to state as fact who God is and what God is, and what he wants, hates, needs, won’t tolerate, or will do -for whom, how, and under what conditions; they don’t have any data to show they’re correct about any of it, yet they speak so matter-of-factly. Even when they contradict each other they’re all still completely confident in their own empty assertions! So why do none of these tens of thousands of head-bobbing, mouth-breathing, glassy-eyed wanna-believers have the presence of mind to ask, “how do you know that?” Well, for all those who never asked the question, here’s the answer; they don’t know that! There’s no way anyone could know these things. They’re making it up as they go along. These sermons are the best possible example of blind speculation; asserted as though it were truth and sold for tithe. If anyone or everyone else would be called liars for claiming such things without any evidentiary basis then why make exceptions for evangelists? For these charlatans are obviously liars too! The clergy are in the same category of questionable credibility as are commissioned salesmen, politicians, and military recruiters.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"4th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80nhqGfN6t8, Youtube (December 25, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Men, God, Hate, Truth

“Life was growing and spreading here the way a disease propagates and eats and in the eating must kill. There should be something more, he thought. A kind of being might come into the universe that did not want to finally eat everything or to command all or to fill every niche and site with its own precious self. It would be a strange thing, with enough of the brute biology in it to have the quick, darting sense of survival. But it would also have to carry something of the machine in it, the passive and accepting quality of duty, of waiting, and of thought that went beyond the endless eating or the fear of dying. To such a thing the universe would not be a battleground but a theater, where eternal dramas were acted out and it was best to be in the audience. Perhaps evolution, which had been at the beginning a blind force that pushed against everything, could find a path to that shambling, curiously lasting state.”

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

Part 6 “Aleph Null”, Chapter 4 (p. 226)
Against Infinity (1983)

Life, Fear, Disease, Way

“The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

"An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind" is of indefinite origin, but has been disputably attributed to various figures, including Mahatma Gandhi. This variant describing it as an "old law" is attributed to King in The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr., (2008) http://books.google.com/books?id=irMxJS36904C&redir_esc=y by Coretta Scott King, Second Edition ; it also occurs in the credits of Spike Lee's movie Do the Right Thing (1989). Disputed

Law

“In the history of madness, two events signal this change with singular clarity: in 1657, the founding of the Hôpital Général, and the Great Confinement of the poor; and in 1794, the liberation of the mad in chains at Bicêtre. Between these two singular and symmetrical events, something happened, whose ambiguity has perplexed historians of medicine: blind repression in an absolutist regime, according to some, and, according to others, the progressive discovery, by science and philanthropy, of madness in its positive truth. In fact, beneath these reversible meanings, a structure was taking shape, which did not undo that ambiguity but was decisive for it. This structure explains the passage from the medieval and humanist experience of madness to the experience that is our own, which confines madness in mental illness.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Preface to 1961 edition
History of Madness (1961)

Truth, History, Decision, Science

“How safe and easy the poor man's life and his humble dwelling! How blind men still are to Heaven's gifts!”
O vitae tuta facultas pauperis angustique lares! o munera nondum intellecta deum!

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia

Book V, line 527 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

Life, Men

“Everything is so arranged that the blind logic of mathematics executes the will of the most enlightened and free Mind.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Les Loix du Mouvement et du Repos, déduites d'un Principe Métaphysique (1746)

Mathematics

“Finally Jones came in with a blinding fastball, the way Sad Sam used to throw ’em, and Clemente unloaded. The wind was blowing in from left field that day, and blowing hard. This was 1960, remember, before the fences had been moved in, and nobody was hitting home runs at Candlestick. Not Mays, not Cepeda, not anybody. Clemente’s bat hit the ball, and the result absolutely clubbed the crowd into awed silence for a long moment. Right into that wet whipping wind the ball carried. Right on through, hit 120 feet high in a long soaring majestic parabola that came down finally over 450 feet away. There is just no way of telling how far Clemente’s home run blast would have traveled had it not been for that wind. Suffice it to say partisan Giant fans suddenly broke their shell-shocked silence and let loose a gagantic roar. For two innings the stadium buzzed. For days the Giants talked about it. Even today if you slip up behind a Giant pitcher and suddenly whisper in his ear: ‘Remember the home run Clemente hit?’ he’s likely to jump as high as if he’d been caught putting spit on baseballs.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From "Roberto Clemente: Arriba!" in Baseball Stars of 1962 (March 1962), edited by Ray Robinson, p. 115
Sports-related

Sadness, Way, Travel, Home

“She knows I'm a deserter from the Scottish Fusiliers,
She knows I stole a blind-man's can…that got me seven years!
She knows I've been connected with a gang of West-End Pests,
And the police have had me twice inside the cage;
And she knows I mix with ladies that have got a shady past,
But my mother doesn't know I'm on the stage.”

Billy Bennett (1887–1942) British comedian

"My Mother Doesn't Know I'm on the Stage", line 11

Past

“Many of our fellow citizens do not share the blind faith in the simple beneficence of all technological innovation. And because they do not share the corporealist, morally neutral, and in some cases atheistic world-view that they attribute (fairly or not) to science and scientists, they are reluctant to surrender the power of decision to the very people who they think are creating the problem.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Forbidding Science: Some Beginning Reflections (2006)

People, World, Faith, Problem

“By virtue of its innermost intention, and like all questions about language, structuralism escapes the classical history of ideas which already supposes structuralism’s possibility, for the latter naively belongs to the province of language and propounds itself within it. Nevertheless, by virtue of an irreducible region of irreflection and spontaneity within it, by virtue of the essential shadow of the undeclared, the structuralist phenomenon will deserve examination by the historian of ideas. For better or for worse. Everything within this phenomenon that does not in itself transparently belong to the question of the sign will merit this scrutiny; as will everything within it that is methodologically effective, thereby possessing the kind of infallibil-ity now ascribed to sleepwalkers and formerly attributed to instinct, which was said to be as certain as it was blind.”

Jacques Derrida book Writing and Difference

Force and Signification
Writing and Difference (1978)

History, Idea, Question

“Once we realize that the principles of our actions have no other support than our blind choice, we really do not believe in them anymore… In order to live, we have to silence the easily silenced voice of reason, which tells us that our principles are in themselves as good or as bad an any other principles. The more we cultivate reason, the more we cultivate nihilism…”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

Source: Natural Right and History (1953), p. 6

Support, Silence

“If you were alone
and suddenly became blind,
and even so
you keep walking forward.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Endless Sorrow
Lyrics, I am...

“Have mercy on the criminal
Who is running from the law.
Are you blind to the winds of change?
Don't you hear him any more?”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Have Mercy on the Criminal
Song lyrics, Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player (1973)

Law, Change

“It seemed to me that I, the spirit of so many worlds, the flower of so many ages, was the Church Cosmical, fit at last to be the bride of God. But instead I was blinded and seared and struck down by terrible light.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 163)

God, Age, World, Flowers

“Special interests and the demented philosophy of conquest have driven most wars throughout history. Rarely has the cause of liberty, as it was in our own revolution, been the driving force. In recent decades our policies have been driven by neo-conservative empire radicalism, profiteering in the military industrial complex, misplaced do-good internationalism, mercantilistic notions regarding the need to control natural resources, and blind loyalty to various governments in the Middle East.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Statement on the Iraq War Resolution http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2007/cr021407.htm (February 14, 2007). 2000s, 2006-2009

War, History, Nature, Loyalty

“Here the reason
no less than all separate acts
Must give way,
For our powers become simple in Love;
They are silent
And In the most secret part of the understanding, the simple eye is ever open. It contemplates and gazes at the Light with a pure sight that is lit by the Light itself: eye to eye, mirror to mirror, image to image. The sight of the simple eye is a living mirror bowed down in the Presence of the Father.
And this revelation of the Father
Lifts the soul above the reason
Into the Imageless Nudity.
There the soul is simple, pure, spotless,
Empty of all things;
And it is in this state of perfect emptiness
That the Father manifests His Divine radiance.
To this radiance neither reason nor sense,
Observation nor distinction,
Can attain.
All this must stay below;
For the measureless radiance
Blinds the eyes of the reason,
They cannot bear the Incomprehensible Light.
But above the reason,
In the most secret part of the understanding,
The simple eye is ever open.
It contemplates and gazes at the Light
With a pure sight that is lit by the Light itself:
Eye to eye,
Mirror to mirror,
Image to image.
This threefold act makes us like God,
And unites us to Him;
For the sight of the simple eye is a living mirror,
Which God has made for His image,
And whereon He has impressed it.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

A Mirror of Eternal Blessedness

Love, God, Secret, Way

“The Jews are returning to their land of unbelief. They are spiritually blind and desperately in need of their Messiah and Savior.”

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) American evangelical pastor, televangelist, and conservative political commentator

Listen, America! (1981)

“All is gone, all is gone, admit it, take flight.
I gagged twice, doubled, tears blinding my sight.
My mind it was mangled, I ran into the night
Leaving all of love's ashes behind me.
The wind knocks my window, the room it is wet.
The words to say I'm sorry, I haven't found yet.
I think of her often and hope whoever she's met
Will be fully aware of how precious she is.
Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,
"How good, how good does it feel to be free?"”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

And I answer them most mysteriously,
"Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?"
Song lyrics, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), Ballad In Plain D

Love, Hope, Feeling, Bird

“The allegories of the "fall of man" and the "deluge," are the two most important features of the Pentateuch. They are, so to say, the Alpha and Omega, the highest and the lowest keys of the scale of harmony on which resounds the majestic hymns of the creation of mankind; for they discover to him who questions the Zura (figurative Gematria), the process of man's evolution from the highest spiritual entity unto the lowest physical — the post-diluvian man, as in the Egyptian hieroglyphics, every sign of the picture writing which cannot be made to fit within a certain circumscribed geometrical figure may be rejected as only intended by the sacred hierogrammatist for a premeditated blind — so many of the details in the Bible must be treated on the same principle, that portion only being accepted which answers to the numerical methods taught in the Kabala.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume II, Chapter IX

Question

“If only people freed themselves from their beliefs in all kinds of Ormuzds, Brahmas, Sabbaoths, and their incarnation as Krishnas and Christs, from beliefs in Paradises and Hells, in reincarnations and resurrections, from belief in the interference of the Gods in the external affairs of the universe, and above all, if they freed themselves from belief in the infallibility of all the various Vedas, Bibles, Gospels, Tripitakas, Korans, and the like, and also freed themselves from blind belief in a variety of scientific teachings about infinitely small atoms and molecules and in all the infinitely great and infinitely remote worlds, their movements and origin, as well as from faith in the infallibility of the scientific law to which humanity is at present subjected: the historic law, the economic laws, the law of struggle and survival, and so on, — if people only freed themselves from this terrible accumulation of futile exercises of our lower capacities of mind and memory called the "Sciences", and from the innumerable divisions of all sorts of histories, anthropologies, homiletics, bacteriologics, jurisprudences, cosmographies, strategies — their name is legion — and freed themselves from all this harmful, stupefying ballast — the simple law of love, natural to man, accessible to all and solving all questions and perplexities, would of itself become clear and obligatory.”

Leo Tolstoy A Letter to a Hindu

Source: A Letter to a Hindu (1908), VI

Love, God, People, World

“Each year in Africa about two and a half million people go blind…and they just go blind… they sit around in their huts.”

Fred Hollows (1929–1993) New Zealand–Australian ophthalmologist

Culture and Recreation Government Site http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/fredhollows/

People

“The mystery is how a conception that is vulnerable to such obvious counterexamples survived for so long. I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: Once you have accepted a theory, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert has observed, disbelieving is hard work.”

Daniel Kahneman (1934) Israeli-American psychologist

Bias, Blindness and How We Truly Think (Part 2): Daniel Kahneman, bloomberg.com, 24 October 2011, 15 May 2014 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-25/bias-blindness-and-how-we-truly-think-part-2-daniel-kahneman.html, "Bias, Blindness and How We Truly Think" (2011)

“If I saw a glass of wine repeatedly presented to a man, and he took no notice of it, I should be apt to think that he was blind or uncivil. A juster philosophy might teach me rather to think that my eyes deceived me, and that the offer was not really what I conceived it to be.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Essay on the Principle of Population (1798; rev. through 1826)

Thinking, Wine

“Psychology is familiar with the “eternal victim,” who exploits this position for disguised aggressions. Also belonging to this category, in a broader sense, are those permanent losers as well as medical and political hypochondriacs who lament that conditions are so terrible that it is a great sacrifice on their part not to kill themselves or emigrate. On the German Left, not least of all under the influence of the sociologized schema of the victim, a certain type of renegade has emerged who feels that it is a dirty trick to have to live in this land without summer and without oppositional forces. Nobody can say that such a viewpoint does not know what it is talking about. Its mistake is that it remains blind to itself. For the accusation becomes bound to misery and magnifies it under the subterfuge of unsuspecting critical observations. With the obstinacy of a Sophist, in aggressive self-reification, many a “critical” consciousness refuses to become healthier than the sick whole.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 58

Feeling, Sense, Summer, Parting

Quotes about blind page 4

Quotes about blind
page 4