Quotes about eye
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“The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn't mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

Fear, Beauty

“Each of us has been made “a little lower than the angels.” What an incomprehensible compliment! But it’s not only a compliment; it’s also a responsibility, for our special status equalizes us with other people in the eyes of God. The Lord has exalted not only me or some special group; God has exalted everyone. It’s the people of Burkina Faso and Niger and Guyana and Haiti. It’s people who never learned to read and write or who live on fifty cents a day. All human beings have been made a little lower than the angels, and we have a responsibility to treat them accordingly.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Source: Through the Year with Jimmy Carter: 366 Daily Meditations from the 39th President

God, People, Angels, Learning

“When I looked into her eyes, I saw an invisible spirit of something that I already loved.”

Anthony Kiedis book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue

Love

“Preacher, keep your knees on the ground & your eyes on the throne.”

Leonard Ravenhill (1907–1994) British writer

“The Rose does not preen herself to catch my eye. She blooms because she blooms. A saint is a saint until he knows he is one.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Source: One Minute Wisdom

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“The real lover is the man who can thrill you by kissing your forehead or smiling into your eyes or just staring into space.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

love, Cute, Heart Touching, Romantic

“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Life, War, People, World

“Fight on, brave knights! Man dies, but glory lives! Fight on; death is better than defeat! Fight on brave knights! for bright eyes behold your deeds!”

Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet

Death, Fight

“To draw, you must close your eyes and sing”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Singing, Drawing

“Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Beauty, Nature, Painting

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hands can't hit what the eyes can't see.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

Variant: Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
Source: Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times

Bee

“I can't think of anything to write about, I'm just walking around here between the lines, under the light of your eyes, in the breadth of your mouth as in a beautiful happy day, which remains beautiful and happy, even when the head is sick and tired.”

Franz Kafka book Letters to Milena

Source: Letters to Milena

Beauty, Thinking, Light, Happiness

“Her eyes always had a frantic, lost look. He could never cure her eyes of that.”

Charles Bukowski book South of No North

Source: South of No North

“Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“And now I need you to do for me what I cannot do for myself. For you to be my eyes when I do not have them. For you to be my hands when I cannot use my own. For you to be my heart when mine is done beating.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Heart

“The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and Out in Paris and London

Star

“As the two-thousand-year-old saying goes, you can have eyes and still not see. But a hard life improves vision.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book Cancer Ward

Source: Cancer Ward

Life

“Mysteriously, as elusive as it is, this moment--where the eye is what it sees, where the heart is what it feels--this moment shows us that what is real is sacred”

Mark Nepo (1951) American writer

Feeling, Heart

“Television is chewing gum for the eyes.”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

“Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I hear the roar of women’s silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt.”

Thomas Sankara (1949–1987) President of Upper Volta

Source: Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle

Women, People, Feeling, Sense

“It got so that when he closed his eyes, letters and words danced in his mind. He thought of little else during that time.”

Christopher Paolini book Eragon

Source: Eragon

Time, Dance

“There is only one way to see things,
until someone shows us how to look at them
with different eyes”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Way

“And then something truly bizarre happened. I could feel his touch through our eyes. I couldn't look away from him.”

P. C. Cast (1960) American writer

Feeling

“Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.”

Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) English children's writer and illustrator

God, Lie, Flowers

“Annabeth's face, her blond hair and gray eyes, the way she laughed, threw her arms around him, and gave him a kiss whenever he did something stupid.
She must have kissed me a lot, Percy thought.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Stupidity, Way, Kiss

“Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last embrace!
And, lips, oh you the doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death!”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

Death, Kiss

“If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

“Faith is like radar that sees through the fog -- the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.”

Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) Dutch resistance hero and writer

Faith, Reality

“Shut your eyes and see.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

“If you have insight, you use your inner eye, your inner ear, to pierce to the heart of things, and have no need of intellectual knowledge.”

Zhuangzi (-369–-286 BC) classic Chinese philosopher

Knowledge, Heart

“Miranda doesn't dream, she simply rests. When Miranda's eyes are at ease, her mind is at peace.”

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) Austrian poet and author

Source: Simultan: Erzählungen

Peace, Dreams

“And David saw himself reflected in the Woodsman's eyes, and there he was no longer old but a young man, for a man is always his father's child no matter how old he is or how long they have been apart.”

John Connolly The Book of Lost Things

Source: The Book of Lost Things

“I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Tear, Cry, Flying

“One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”

Loren Eiseley (1907–1977) US philosopher (1907-1977)

“We will be asked how, on our theory, justice can be a virtue and injustice a vice, since it will surely be difficult to show that any man whatsoever must need to be just as he needs the use of his hands and eyes, or needs prudence, courage and temperance? Before answering this question I shall argue that if it cannot be answered then justice can no longer be recommended as a virtue.”

Philippa Foot (1920–2010) British philosopher

"Moral Beliefs"

Justice, Courage, Question

“The sunflower keeps its eye on the sun with its back turned to the shade. We die facing life with our backs to death, as if we were walking out of a room backwards.”

Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) Mauritian artist

Sens-plastique

Life, Death, Sun

“The central idea is that government fiscal policy, its spending and taxing, its borrowing and repayment of loans, its issue of new money and withdrawal of money, shall be undertaken with an eye only to the results of these actions on the economy and not to any established traditional doctrine what is sound and what is unsound …Government should adjust its rates of expenditure and taxation such that total spending is neither more or less than that which is sufficient to purchase the full employment level of output at current prices. If this means there is deficit, greater borrowing, "printing money," etc., then these things in themselves are neither good or bad, they are simply the means to the desired ends of full employment and price stability.”

Abba Lerner (1903–1982) American economist

On Functional Finance: (1943, pg.354) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=174849

Money, Idea

“Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left
Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit, Christ where I arise
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.”

Saint Patrick (385–461) 5th-century Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland

Variant:
Christ for my guardianship today: against poison, against burning, against drowning, against wounding, that there may come to me a multitude of rewards;
Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ over me,
Christ to right of me,
Christ to left of me,
Christ in lying down,
Christ in sitting,
Christ in rising up,
Christ in the heart of every person who may think of me,
Christ in the mouth of every person who may speak of me,
Christ in every eye, which may look on me!
Christ in every ear, which may hear me!
The Lorica of Patrick

Lie, Thinking, Heart, Christ

“Not all cartoon humor is just about having bugged-out eyes and tongues flying out of people's heads.”

John Kricfalusi (1955) Canadian animator

Dixon, Collected Interviews, 90–91

People, Flying

“You are only a disciple because your eyes are closed. The day you open them you will see there is nothing you can learn from me or anyone."
"What then is a Master for?"
"To make you see the uselessness of having one.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Blindness
One Minute Wisdom (1989)

Learning

“Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding?”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Crito
Plato, Crito

Men, God, Understanding, Country

“Love knows not distance; it hath no continent; its eyes are for the stars, its feet for the swords; it continueth, though an army lay waste the pasture; it comforteth when there are no medicines; it hath the relish of manna; and by it do men live in the desert.”

Gilbert Parker (1862–1932) Canadian novelist and British politician

"The White Omen"

Love, Men, Star

“One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fiber of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Black Cat

The Black Cat (1843)

Home, Soul, Cats, Night

“The word anti-Semitism is another word which should be eliminated from the English language. "Anti-Semitism" serves only one purpose today. It is used as a smear word. When so-called or self-styled Jews feel that anyone opposes any of their objectives they discredit their victims by applying the word anti-Semite or anti-Semitic through all the channels they have at their command and under their control. I can speak with great authority on that subject. Because so-called or self-styled Jews were unable to disprove my public statements in 1946 with regard to the situation in Palestine, they spent millions of dollars to smear me as an anti-Semite hoping thereby to discredit me in the eyes of the public who were very much interested in what I had to say. Until 1946 I was a little saint to all so-called or self-styled Jews. When I disagreed with them publicly on the Zionist intentions in Palestine I became suddenly Anti-Semite No. 1.”

Benjamin H. Freedman (1890–1984) American businessman

Facts are Facts (1954)

Hope, Feeling

“The other night my daughter Lorna reminisced about the time I regressed to complete infantilism. We were having dinner and tapioca pudding was served. A wild glint came into my eyes and in the presence of my wife and children I shrieked at the top of my voice, “I love this more than anything in the world!” I had to be withdrawn from tapioca pudding slowly. It was one of the few times I wasn’t committed to achieve withdrawal.”

Oscar Levant book The Memoirs of an Amnesiac

The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965)

Love, Children, World, Time

“You lift my feet off the ground,
You spin me around.
You make me crazier, crazier.
Feels like I'm fallin' and I
Am lost in your eyes.
You make me crazier, crazier, crazier.”

Taylor Swift (1989) American singer-songwriter

Crazier (2008) (promotional single for Hannah Montana: The Movie).
Song lyrics

Feeling

“His Mohammed, as has been said, commands that ruling is to be done by the sword, and in his Koran the sword is the commonest and noblest work. Thus the Turk is, in truth, nothing but a murderer or highwayman, as his deeds show before men’s eyes.”

Martin Luther book On War against the Turk

On War against the Turk (1529)

Men, Truth

“When you looked into my eyes,
I stood there like I was hyp-notized.
You sent a feeling to my spine,
A feeling warm and smooth and fine.
But all I could do were stand there paralyzed.
When we kissed, ooh what a thrill,
You took my hand and, ooh baby, what a chill.
I felt like grabbin' you real tight,
Squeeze and squeeze with all my might.
But all I could do were stand there paralyzed.”

Elvis Presley (1935–1977) American singer and actor

Paralyzed, written by Otis Blackwell and Elvis Presley (1956)
Song lyrics

Feeling, Kiss, Baby

“You know that episode where I said I'd stopped drinking? Well, I lied. Ted is so militant in his views. I lived with him for 12 days and it's hard to imagine ever doing anything that would truly look good in his eyes. Also he said some stuff online about Dimebag which I thought was really not cool. I'm not going to repeat it but you can check it out online.”

Sebastian Bach (1968) Canadian singer

http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/blabbermouth.net/news.aspx?mode=Article&newsitemID=60702 Blabbermouth.net (October 21, 2006)

Imagination, Drink

“As sheep come issuing forth from out the fold
By ones and twos and threes, and the others stand
Timidly, holding down their eyes and nostrils,
And what the foremost does the others do,
Huddling themselves against her, if she stop,
Simple and quiet and the wherefore know not.”

Dante Alighieri book Purgatorio

Canto III, lines 79–84 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio

“Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.”

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British filmmaker

As quoted in Hitchcock (1967) by François Truffaut.

People

“Cause all I know is we said hello
And your eyes look like coming home.
All I know is a simple name, everything has changed.
All I know is we held the door,
You'll be mine and I'll be yours.
All I know since yesterday is everything has changed.”

Taylor Swift (1989) American singer-songwriter

Everything Has Changed, written by Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran.
Song lyrics, Red (2012)

Home, Change

“"Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality," says one of my favorite Byzantine mystics. I did this when a child; I do it now as well in the most creative moments of my life.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Report to Greco

"The Son", Ch. 4, p. 45
Report to Greco (1965)

Life, Reality, Change

“From everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living nothing is in my eyes better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve for anything secret or bad.”

Ivo Andrič (1892–1975) novelist, short story writer

The Bridges, as quoted in The Old Bridge of Mostar and Increasing Respect for Cultural Property in Armed Conflict (2012) by Jadranka Petrovic, p. 65

Secret, Sense, Housing

“Our eyes are always flashing sudden flicks of different pictures to our brains, yet none of that saccadic action leads to any sense of change or motion in the world; each thing reposes calmly in its "place!"”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

...What makes us such innate Copernicans?
Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

World, Sense, Change

“A baby is born into this world in a state of fear. Total paranoia and awareness. He sees the world with eyes not used yet. As he grows up, his parents lay all this stuff on him. They tell him, when they should be letting him tell them. Let the children lead you.”

Charles Manson (1934–2017) American criminal and musician

Rolling Stone interview (June 1970)

Children, World, Fear, Parent

“I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark almost blue color, and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.””

John Green book The Fault in Our Stars

A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."
Augustus "Gus" Waters, p. 310-313
The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

Love, Death, War, People

“I am not dead I sit the sun closes my eyes when I open them I see the face I lost Sethe's is the face that left me Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile her smiling face is the place for me it is the face I lost she is my face smiling at me doing it at last a hot thing now we can join.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 22

Smile, Sun, Dead

“You're my bondage and my freedom,
my flesh burning like a naked summer night,
you're my country.
Hazel eyes marbled green,
you're awesome, beautiful, and brave,
you're my desire always just out of reach.”

Nâzım Hikmet (1902–1963) Turkish poet

From You're

Beauty, Freedom, Summer, Night

“MUSEUM
They came, they looked, they walked
their eyes wide open
they didn’t see
because their minds were closed

Their eyes wide open
they didn’t know they couldn’t see
because their minds were closed;
so they looked, and left.”

Eugene J. Martin (1938–2005) American artist

Annotated Drawings by Eugene J. Martin: 1977-1978

“Let's be perfectly clear, shall we. The fox is not a little orange puppy dog with doe eyes and a waggly tail. It's a disease-ridden wolf with the morals of a psychopath and the teeth of a great white shark.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

A Murderous Fox Has Made Me Shoot David Beckham, p. 161
The World According to Clarkson (2005)

Disease, Dogs, Wolf

“Weeping itself there does not let them weep,
And grief that finds a barrier in the eyes
Turns itself inward to increase the anguish.”

Dante Alighieri book Inferno

Canto XXXIII, lines 94–96 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Inferno

“I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think.
There are the rushing waves
mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillions apart
yet forming white surf in unison.Ages on ages
before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?
On a dead planet
with no life to entertain.Never at rest
tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the sun
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar. Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

The Value of Science (1955)

Life, Age, Mountain, Business

“There is relationship between sight and touch, something about eyes being able to see through the fingers touching the clay, about fingers being able to feel what the eyes are seeing without the fingers actually touching it.”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 20 (Vintage 2003)

Feeling

“We see a friend’s eye as one and indivisible. A stranger’s eye we take in part by part: the white, the iris, and the pupil.”

Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) Mauritian artist

Sens-plastique

Parting

“Something in her eyes
Must be the smoke in my lungs.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

Clean Up Before She Comes.
Song lyrics, Posthumously released (post-1994)

“Is your voice “silence”?
When you are not singing a song then I hear your song’s melody clearly!
Your voice is silence. Is your face “darkness”?
When I shut my eyes then I see your face clearly!
Your face is darkness.Is your shadow “light”?
Your shadow is cast on the dark window after the moon has gone down!
Your shadow is light.”

Han Yong-un (1879–1944) Korean writer

"Inverse Proportion", translated by Sammy Solberg

Light, Silence, Singing

“I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I'm therefore not a pacifist at all – or am I? Perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that for myself. I’m such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it's like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself; it's for that reason that I went to war, and for that reason I volunteered.”

Otto Dix (1891–1969) German painter and printmaker

in the German army during world War 1. (1914-1918) Quote from Otto Dix, 1891-1969, exhibition catalogue, London: Tate Gallery, 1992, pp. 17–18; cf. pp. 27–28; as cited by Roy Forward, in 'Education resource material: beauty, truth and goodness in Dix's War' https://nga.gov.au/dix/edu.pdf, p. 9

Life, War, World, Personality

“Dear God, these are anxious times. Tonight for the first time I lay in the dark with burning eyes as scene after scene of human suffering passed before me. I shall promise You one thing, God, just one very small thing: I shall never burden my today with cares about my tomorrow, although that takes some practice. Each day is sufficient unto itself. I shall try to help You, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. Alas, there doesn't seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.”

Etty Hillesum (1914–1943) Jewish diarist

12 July 1942, p. 488-89
Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943

God, Suffering, Time, Help

“How long in woman lasts the fire of love,
If eye or touch do not relight it often.”

Dante Alighieri book Purgatorio

Canto VIII, lines 77–78 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio

Love

“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.”

George Orwell book Politics and the English Language

Politics and the English Language (1946)

People, World, Feeling, Light

“What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve.”
Vulgo dicitur: Quod non videt oculus, cor non dolet.

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) French abbot, theologian

In Festo Omnium Sanctorum, Sermo 5, sect. 5; translation from Scottish Notes and Queries, 1st series, vol. 7, p. 59
Context: It is commonly said: What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve.

Heart

“The healthy eye ought to see all visible things and not to say, I wish for green things; for this is the condition of the diseased eye. And the healthy hearing and smelling ought to be ready to perceive all that can be heard and smelled. And the healthy stomach ought to be”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

X, 35
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X
Context: The healthy eye ought to see all visible things and not to say, I wish for green things; for this is the condition of the diseased eye. And the healthy hearing and smelling ought to be ready to perceive all that can be heard and smelled. And the healthy stomach ought to be with respect to all food just as the mill with respect to all things which it is formed to grind. And accordingly the healthy understanding ought to be prepared for everything which happens; but that which says, Let my dear children live, and let all men praise whatever I may do, is an eye which seeks for green things, or teeth which seek for soft things.

Disease

“Be the living expression of God's kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.”

Matka Tereza (1910–1997) Roman Catholic saint of Albanian origin

As quoted in Worldwide Laws of Life : 200 Eternal Spiritual Principles‎ (1998) by John Templeton, p. 448
1990s
Context: Spread love everywhere you go; first of all in your house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor. Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.

God, Smile

“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

In his letter to Theo, from The Hague, 21 July 1882, http://www.vggallery.com/letters/245_V-T_218.pdf 1880s, 1882 Context: What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

People, Personality

“I will be compelled to show some colonial stratagem which will open the eyes of not only the Victoria Police and inhabitants but also the whole British army”

Ned Kelly (1855–1880) Australian bushranger

Jerilderie Letter (1879)
Context: It will pay Government to give those people who are suffering innocence, justice and liberty. if not I will be compelled to show some colonial stratagem which will open the eyes of not only the Victoria Police and inhabitants but also the whole British army and no doubt they will acknowledge their hounds were barking at the wrong stump.

“Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy, because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes, you cannot see the truth.”

Rajneesh (1931–1990) Godman and leader of the Rajneesh movement

God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth (1989) YouTube video of the lecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBEIeRSLb8k Context: It was good of Friedrich Nietzsche to declare God dead — I declare that he has never been born. It is a created fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you understand the difference between invention and discovery? A discovery is about truth, an invention is manufactured by you. It is man-manufactured fiction. Certainly it has given consolation, but consolation is not the right thing! Consolation is opium. It keeps you unaware of the reality, and life is flowing past you so quickly — seventy years will be gone soon. Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy, because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes, you cannot see the truth. The very desire to find the truth disappears. But in the beginning it is bitter if all your belief systems are taken away from you. The fear and anxiety which you have been suppressing for millennia, which is there, very alive, will surface immediately. No God can destroy it, only the search for truth and the experience of truth — not a belief — is capable of healing all your wounds, of making you a whole being. And the whole person is the holy person to me.

Truth

“When I am dead, bury me
In my beloved Ukraine,
My tomb upon a grave mound high
Amid the spreading plain,
So that the fields, the boundless steppes,
The Dnieper's plunging shore
My eyes could see, my ears could hear
The mighty river roar.

When from Ukraine the Dnieper bears
Into the deep blue sea
The blood of foes… then will I leave
These hills and fertile fields --
I'll leave them all and fly away
To the abode of God,
And then I'll pray…. But until that day
I know nothing of God.

Oh bury me, then rise ye up
And break your heavy chains
And water with the tyrants' blood
The freedom you have gained.
And in the great new family,
The family of the free,
With softly spoken, kindly word
Remember also me.”

Taras Shevchenko Testamento

Taras Shevchenko Zapovit, 1845 (Shevchenko's "Testament"), Translated by John Weir, Toronto, 1961; Online at

God, Family, Freedom, Water

“The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.”

Francis William Bourdillon (1852–1921) British poet

"Light" (popularly known as "The Night has a Thousand Eyes"), published in The Spectator (October 1873).
Context: p>The Night has a thousand eyes,
And the Day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.</p

Love, Life, Light, Heart

“That is what Castle's work needed: a beginner's eye”

Theodore Roszak book Flicker

Flicker (1991)
Context: That is what Castle's work needed: a beginner's eye—my eye, before it became too schooled and guarded, while it was still in touch with the vulgar foundations of the art, still vulnerably naive enough to receive that faint and flickering revelation of the dark god whose scriptures are the secret history of the movies.

“It's just you and me.
It is the eyes and look.
This is true communion.
This is more significant. ”

Marina Abramović (1946) Yugoslav-American artist

“Beauty is seen through the eyes, but beautiful people are only known through your heart.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

Beauty, People, Heart

“There is the world for you. Beauty, true beauty, is intangible. It is in the eye of the beholder. Something that we can lose at any moment, and the more you examine it, the more illusive it becomes. True happiness is virtue, and virtue is predicated on knowledge and righteous conduct.”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic

in The Alchemist of Happiness

World, Beauty, Knowledge, Happiness

“The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief. A man who saw clearly and with open eyes and was then living could see how this miracle took place and how the whole of a society could, in a single day, be transformed. In a few minutes the business quarter, based on centuries of tradition, was wiped out. It is true that there had always been concealed enmities and jealousies and religious intolerance, coarseness and cruelty, but there had also been courage and fellowship and a feeling for measure and order, which restrained all these instincts within the limits of the supportable and, in the end, calmed them down and submitted them to the general interest of life in common. Men who had been leaders in the commercial quarter for forty years vanished overnight as if they had all died suddenly, together with the habits, customs and institutions which they represented.”

Ivo Andrič book The Bridge on the Drina

Source: The Bridge on the Drina (1945), Ch. 22

Courage, Law, History, Business

“He had hardly had any pretence of the politicians. For him education was not confined to lecture halls and laboratories. Rather, it was an essential part of national survival. He always set his eyes on the objectives which are essential to the destiny of the nation.”

Zakir Hussain (politician) (1897–1969) 3rd President of India

Times of India in: p. 347.
About Zakir Hussain, Quest for Truth (1999)

Education, Parting

“The feeling of motherhood in a woman becomes stronger as she grows older. In fact a time comes when every man is like a son in the eyes of a woman. There is not an ounce of sexual desire left in her heart. But his stage never comes in a man…he can never free himself from sexual desires.”

Premchand (1880–1936) Hindi writer

In the novel Bhoot quoted in page=92.
Portrayal of Women in Premchands Stories A Critique

Time, Feeling, Heart

“He held her hand because he wanted her heart; then gazed into her empty eyes and realized nothing was there. Often, the emotions of someone we love are dismissed in a continual effort to remain.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1984

Love, Making love, Heart, Effort

“And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working – bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming – all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.”

George Orwell book A Hanging

Source: "A Hanging", in The Adelphi (August 1931)

Understanding, Food, World, Life

“Learning about our history and diving deep in Enslaved, opened my eyes to a new way of thinking. Playing my character really inspired me – he was an author who had a role in the abolition of slavery and even signed the document.”

Solomon B Taiwo (1990) English actor and author

Impact interview (2020)

Way, Thinking, Learning, History

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator

Heart, For women

“Those who love so much should focus their thoughts on beauty, and then learn to close the other eye when seeing the ugliness of the subject presented.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Beauty, Learning, Love

“Verona is full of pictures which have never been painted. Every step excites emotion and gives rise to unaffected reflection. In the course of a short stroll, you may pass by a Roman amphitheatre, still used, then the castle of some petty prince of the Middle Ages, and while you are contrasting the sublime elevation of antiquity with the heterogeneous palace of a Scaliger your eyes light on a gate of Oriental appearance and fantastic ornament... The illusion is perfect, the eye rests with pain on the passing citizens in their modern costumes; you look for black velvets and gold chains, white feathers and red stockings.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Letter to Isaac Disraeli (September 1826), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (1929), p. 107

Painting, Perfection, Pain, Light

“Head of Christ by Morales, exactly as in the description in the pseudo letter of the Roman Proconsul. Morales well entitled to his surname of Divino... [T]he auburn locks seem only prevented from growing over the countenance by the moiety of the star which forms the glory: everything which can even be conceived as necessary to the formation of a face of perfect beauty, but nothing earthly in the appearance. You could not mistake the head for an Apollo or an Adonis. The eyes, beaming with human beauty, are nevertheless bright with the effulgence of celestial light, and fixed upon no particular object. They seem looking on the world. The nose is exquisitely formed, and the flesh tints seem immortal.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Diary entry while in Aix (c. 16 August 1824), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (1929), pp. 52-53

Star, Perfection, Light, Appearance