Quotes about eye
page 51

“Young girls passed me with romance still in their eyes, and others, a little older, with the romance dead.”

John Buchan book A Lodge in the Wilderness

The scene is a society ball in London.
Source: A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), Ch. V, p. 145.

“The organization of federal units of black soldiers, comprised of both escaped slaves and free men, was taken as an outrage. It struck a raw nerve, never far off in the southern psyche. Fear of a slave insurrection. The prospect of African American men in blue uniforms was taken as an extreme provocation, so much so that it was proposed in the Confederate congress, and endorsed by General Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter, that all Federals captured, black or white, should be summarily executed. This proposal was never adopted, but the Confederate congress did eventually pass, in May 1863, a proclamation instructing President Jefferson Davis to exercise 'full and ample retaliation' against the north for arming black soldiers. Finally, there was simple revenge. The Union army's shelling of Fredericksburg several months before had been a particular sore point, that festered for months as the Confederate army went into winter quarters nearby. One officer, determined to fix the destruction there in his mind's eye, made a special visit to that town one last time before setting out on the road north into Maryland and Pennsylvania.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Andy Hall, "We have received provocation enough..." http://deadconfederates.com/2013/07/01/we-have-received-provocation-enough/ (1 July 2013), Dead Confederates: A Civil War Era Blog.

Men, Fear, Exercises, Revenge

“STRANGER. In order to see into Space you ought to have an eye, not on your Perimeter, but on your side, that is, on what you would probably call your inside; but we in Spaceland should call it your side.I. An eye in my inside! An eye in my stomach! Your Lordship jests. STRANGER. I am in no jesting humour. I tell you that I come from Space, or, since you will not understand what Space means, from the Land of Three Dimensions whence I but lately looked down upon your Plane which you call Space forsooth. From that position of advantage I discerned all that you speak of as SOLID (by which you mean "enclosed on four sides"), your houses, your churches, your very chests and safes, yes even your insides and stomachs, all lying open and exposed to my view.I. Such assertions are easily made, my Lord.STRANGER. But not easily proved, you mean. But I mean to prove mine.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 16. How the Stranger Vainly Endeavoured to Reveal to Me in Words the Mysteries of Spaceland

Lying, Understanding, Housing

“People are born in sorrow and move about the earth in patterns of sorrow without sense and without plan. Why should I take myself so seriously? I am no more important to the Creator than the trees or the vegetation which live with me on His earth. There is no eye to watch over me nor a hand to direct me, and there will be no preferred fate for me at the end, no matter what I am, or what I do with my life.”

William March book The Tallons

The Tallons (1936)

Life, Fate, People, Sense

“Oedipus had already probed his impious eyes with guilty hand and sunk deep his shame condemned to everlasting night; he dragged out his life in a long-drawn death. He devotes himself to darkness, and in the lowest recess of his abode he keeps his home on which the rays of heaven never look; and yet the fierce daylight of his soul flits around him with unflagging wings and the Avengers of his crimes are in his heart.”
Impia jam merita scrutatus lumina dextra merserat aeterna damnatum nocte pudorem Oedipodes longaque animam sub morte trahebat. illum indulgentem tenebris imaeque recessu sedis inaspectos caelo radiisque penates seruantem tamen adsiduis circumuolat alis saeva dies animi, scelerumque in pectore Dirae.

Statius book Thebaid

Source: Thebaid, Book I, Line 46

Life, Death, Home, Soul

“In the prophetic tradition, properly understood, Islam must be perceived as a legitimate dialectical response to the failure of orthodox Christianity. Protestants should be able to see that the need for a Protestant Reformation was there already in the 7th century C. E., to be perceived by prophetic eyes. … New light is coming from … a profounder appreciation of Judeo-Christian heresy, the alternatives eliminated by that triumph of orthodoxy which Hegel regards, as he regards all world-historical triumphs, as the triumph of God. Victrix causa deis placuit.”

Norman O. Brown (1913–2002) classicist

The Latin phrase "The victorious cause pleased the gods" is from Lucan.
Source: "The Prophetic Tradition" (1982), p. 368

God, World, Failure, Light

“You see a lot — your eyes get very painful.”

John le Carré book Smiley's People

Smiley's People (1979)

Pain

“My proximity to the sheep, cattle, and geese who are now my neighbors in the country is what has finally turned me into a vegetarian. I talk to these animals when I walk. Sometimes I am lucky enough to make physical contact with them, and as I look into their eyes I see not only the innocence, but also the clear fact that those eyes are no less complicated in their structure than my own. Don't we now have enough tasty things to eat from the garden and all the delicious ways to prepare them?”

Mary Tyler Moore (1936–2017) American actress, television producer

After All https://books.google.it/books?id=siBPpd0BdeQC (New York: Putnam, 1995), p. 27

Way, Animals, Country

“The work of an enthusiast who has watched and enjoyed cricket with an eye for detail and for character, for adventure and the human reflection beyond the ropes. It will, I fancy, be read with the same pleasure as it was written.”

Margaret Hughes (1645–1719) British actress

John Arlott, review of All On A Summer's Day; quoted in Times obituary http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article516103.ece <br class="br">About

Pleasure, Reading

“America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.”

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

"Advertisement for 'Games and Ends'", Pt. 5
Advertisements for Myself (1959)

People, Stupidity

“The system here, is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement… I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers… I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay”

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) English writer and social critic and a Journalist

American Notes online at Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/675/pg675.html

Men, Secret, Sense, Suffering

“The discovery of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century implied the beginning of a return to a type of civilization dominated by the eye rather than the ear.”

Harold Innis (1894–1952) Canadian professor of political economy

Industrialism and Cultural Values (1950), a paper presented at meetings of the American Economic Association in Chicago, published in The Bias of Communication (1951) p. 138.
The Bias of Communication (1951)

“My family and I left Yokohoma in June, 1939, in time for me to enter the Army War College in what turned out to be the last class before the school closed for World War II. As we left Japan, I would have said that war between the two countries was certainly possible but I had no premonition that it was only two years away. On the opening day of the war college, a number of senior officers from the War Department attended to welcome the new class. The first man to speak I had never seen before, but he was just as impressive at first glance as he remained in my eyes in later life- George Marshall, the new Army Chief of Staff. What he said that day I do not remember, but the way he said it, I do. General Marshall never spoke anywhere without receiving the undivided attention of every listener to the words of a man who obviously knew what he was talking about. One could never imagine questioning the accuracy of his facts or challenging the soundness of his conclusions on any subject he undertook to discuss. He did not give the impression of great brilliance of mind, as General MacArthur did, but of calm strength and unshakeable will. I was to owe much to him- my service on his staff at the outbreak of the war, later the command of a division in Europe, and assignment as the Superintendent of West Point following the war. Bu my greatest privilege was the opportunity to see General Marshall in action at close range at the outbreak of World War II.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 37

Life, War, World, School

“Be it understood, then, that what we have to do, as students of phenomenology, is simply to open our mental eyes and look well at the phenomenon and say what are the characteristics that are never wanting in it, whether that phenomenon be something that outward experience forces upon our attention, or whether it be the wildest of dreams, or whether it be the most abstract and general of the conclusions of science.
The faculties which we must endeavor to gather for this work are three. The first and foremost is that rare faculty, the faculty of seeing what stares one in the face, just as it presents itself, unreplaced by any interpretation, unsophisticated by any allowance for this or for that supposed modifying circumstance. This is the faculty of the artist who sees for example the apparent colors of nature as they appear. When the ground is covered by snow on which the sun shines brightly except where shadows fall, if you ask any ordinary man what its color appears to be, he will tell you white, pure white, whiter in the sunlight, a little greyish in the shadow. But that is not what is before his eyes that he is describing; it is his theory of what ought to be seen. The artist will tell him that the shadows are not grey but a dull blue and that the snow in the sunshine is of a rich yellow. That artist's observational power is what is most wanted in the study of phenomenology. The second faculty we must strive to arm ourselves with is a resolute discrimination which fastens itself like a bulldog upon the particular feature that we are studying, follows it wherever it may lurk, and detects it beneath all its disguises. The third faculty we shall need is the generalizing power of the mathematician who produces the abstract formula that comprehends the very essence of the feature under examination purified from all admixture of extraneous and irrelevant accompaniments.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 1 : Presentness, CP 5.41 - 42
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)

Dreams, Color, Nature, Study

“The children of fighter pilots tell different stories than other kids do. None of our fathers can write a will or sell a life insurance policy or fill out a prescription or administer a flu shot or explain what a poet meant. We tell of fathers who land on aircraft carriers at pitch-black night with the wind howling out of the China Sea. Our fathers wiped out aircraft batteries in the Philippines and set Japanese soldiers on fire when they made the mistake of trying to overwhelm our troops on the ground. Your Dads ran the barber shops and worked at the post office and delivered the packages on time and sold the cars, while our Dads were blowing up fuel depots near Seoul, were providing extraordinarily courageous close air support to the beleaguered Marines at the Chosin Reservoir, and who once turned the Naktong River red with blood of a retreating North Korean battalion. We tell of men who made widows of the wives of our nations' enemies and who made orphans out of all their children. You don't like war or violence? Or napalm? Or rockets? Or cannons or death rained down from the sky? Then let's talk about your fathers, not ours. When we talk about the aviators who raised us and the Marines who loved us, we can look you in the eye and say "you would not like to have been American's enemies when our fathers passed overhead". We were raised by the men who made the United States of America the safest country on earth in the bloodiest century in all recorded history. Our fathers made sacred those strange, singing names of battlefields across the Pacific: Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh and a thousand more. We grew up attending the funerals of Marines slain in these battles. Your fathers made communities like Beaufort decent and prosperous and functional; our fathers made the world safe for democracy.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Eulogy for a Fighter Pilot (1998)

Love, Life, Death, Men

“I was not in full control of myself, and it seemed that I knew her name from before. The evil in her eyes, her color, her scent and her movements were all familiar to me. It was as though my souls, in the life before this, in the world of imagination, had bordered on her soul and that both souls, of the same essence and substance, were destined for union. I must have lived this life very close to her. I had no desire to touch her; the invisible beams that emanated from our bodies and mingled were sufficient for me. Isn't this terrifying experience which seemed so familiar to met quite the same as the feelings of two lovers who feel that they have known each other before and that a mysterious relationship has previously existed between them? Was it possible that someone else could affect me? The dry, repulsive and ominous laughter of the old man, however, tore our bonds asunder.”

Sadegh Hedayat book The Blind Owl

The Blind Owl

Life, World, Color, Feeling

“O Heaven! Today I am sick and tired
Of the colors and forms of this world! …
I close my eyes to disregard the present,
Gradually shifting into the past upon my eyelids.
I close my eyes to let the dark shadows arise boundlessly,
Immense as in the deep of night,
To let my soul grow dark with the artificial,
In the world of the dead so long awaited.
Let the shades of ghosts and demons one by one appear.
Let their cries, their shouts of epilogue, reverberate in my ear.
Let me roll about, my soul intoxicated with illusion,
To put out of mind for a few minutes the scenes of this world!
Let my soul soar rapidly over great distances
In the dark night shadows of my eyelids,
And proudly assert: Here is a world
Created in a moment of grief.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"Creation", as quoted in "Shattered Identities and Contested Images: Reflections of Poetry and History in 20th-Century Vietnam" by Neil Jamieson, in Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1992, p. 89, and in Understanding Vietnam by Neil Jamieson (University of California Press, 1995), ISBN 978-0520916586, p. 164

World, Color, Soul, Appearance

“It is easy to distinguish the evil worked by sin and vice, but the trained eye sees also the evil done by self-righteous or self-regarding virtue.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Karma

Evil, Training

“Ammu had an elaborate Calcutta wedding. Later, looking back on the day, Ammu realized that the slightest feverish glitter in her bridegroom's eyes had not been love, or even excitement at the prospect of carnal bliss, but approximately eight large pegs of whiskey. Straight. Neat.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

Love, Wedding

“I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but a thing I have found in life is that from time to time, as you jog along, there occur moments which you are able to recognize immediately with the naked eye as high spots. Something tells you that they are going to remain etched, if etched is the word I want, for ever on the memory and will come back to you at intervals down the years, as you are dropping off to sleep, banishing that drowsy feeling and causing you to leap on the pillow like a gaffed salmon.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Code of the Woosters

The Code of the Woosters (1938)

Life, Feeling, Sleep, Memory

“When the star dies, its eye closes; tired of watching, it flies back to its first bright dream.”

Dejan Stojanovic book Circling: 1978-1987

“The Star and the Eye,” p. 46
Circling: 1978-1987 (1993), Sequence: “A Grain”

Dreams, Star

“Clara:
Neighbours, dear friends, ye dream, ye dream : awake!
Gaze not on me with sadly wondering eyes,
I only bid you to your actual wish.
My voice is but the voice of your own hearts.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette (7th March 1835)
Translations, From the German

Dreams, Heart

“A note to our enemies. You think you know America, but you only see the tiny, inept, incompetent, cowering political tip of a very big, very capable iceberg. You don't know the Heartland where the people are fiercely independent and willing to defend this nation with their bare hands if that's what it takes. You don't know the steel workers in Pittsburgh with muscles that could break a man's neck like a twig. You don't know the swamp folks in Cajun country that can wrestle a full-grown alligator out of the water. You don't know the mountain folks in Appalachia who can knock a squirrel's eye out from a hundred yards away with a small caliber rifle. You don't know the farmers, the cowboys, the loggers and the seagoing folks. You don't know the truck drivers, the carpenters, the mountain men who live off the land, the hard rock miners or the small town cops who keep the peace in the rowdy border towns. No, you don't know America.”

Charlie Daniels (1936) American singer and musician

2010s, 2016, Letter to America's Enemies (2016)

Men, People, Peace, Mountain

“What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth.”

Norman Cousins (1915–1990) American journalist

Reader’s Digest (September 1980).

Men

“Sadly, they played very dirty. This ugly, vulgar, hard, hermetic, hardly eye-catching, hardly football style… If with this they got satisfaction, fine, but they lost.”

Johan Cruyff (1947–2016) Dutch association football player

Criticising the Dutch team's play in the 2010 World Cup final, in BBC Sport (12 July 2010) http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2010/8812484.stm.

Football

“Everything in nature completes its action through its own force and species alone… as, for example, fire by its own force dries and consumes and does many things. Therefore vision must perform the act of seeing by its own force. But the act of seeing is the perception of a visible object at a distance, and therefore vision perceives what is visible by its own force multiplied to the object. Moreover, the species of the things of world are not fitted by nature to effect the complete act of vision at once, because of its nobleness. Hence these must be aided by the species of the eye, which travels in the locality of the visual pyramid, and changes the medium and ennobles it, and renders it analogous to vision, and so prepares the passage of the species itself of the visible object… Concerning the multiplication of this species, moreover, we are to understand that it lies in the same place as the species of the thing seen, between the sight and the thing seen, and takes place along the pyramid whose vertex is in the eye and base in the thing seen. And as the species of an object in the same medium travels in a straight path and is refracted in different ways when it meets a medium of another transparency, and is reflected when it meets the obstacles of a dense body; so is it also true of the species of vision that it travels altogether along the path of the species itself of the visible object.”

Roger Bacon book Opus Majus

Bacon, like Grosseteste, asserts that both the active extramitted species of vision from the eye, and the intramitted species of light from object seen, were necessary for sight.
v. i. vii. 4, ed. Briggs as quoted in A.C. Crombie, Robert Grossetest and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (1953)
Opus Majus, c. 1267

World, Way, Travel, Understanding

“Here and in the hereafter, we must embrace all those who with absolute faith accept Allah in their hearts. We must pray to Allah in a state of unity, peacefulness, and truth, and then give greetings of peace to each brother. Standing face to face, our eyes looking directly into our brother's eyes, our hands clasping his hands, and our hearts embracing his heart with love, we must say, "May the peace of God be upon you." This is the unity and beauty of Islam, the beauty that Muhammad (Sal.) brought to the people. Wherever we go, our hearts must be in that state. Our prayers must be one-pointed, directed toward the same place, toward Allah, the One who is truth. If we can recite the praises of Allah and the Prophet, then look each other in the eye, give peaceful greetings, and embrace each other — if we can achieve that oneness of the heart with all lives, then we will be true believers.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

Love, God, People, Truth

“Although I enter not,
Yet round about the spot
Ofttimes I hover;
And near the sacred gate
With longing eyes I wait,
Expectant of her.”

William Makepeace Thackeray book Pendennis

Pendennis: At the Church Gate, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
The History of Pendennis (1848-1850)

Waiting

“If you gaze at a single leaf on a single tree, you do not see the other leaves. If you face the tree with no intention and do not fix your eyes on a single leaf, then you will see all the many leaves. If your mind is preoccupied with one leaf, you do not see the others, if you do not set your attention on one; you will see hundreds and thousands of leaves.”

Yagyū Munenori (1571–1646) samurai and daimyo of the early Edo period

A Hereditary Book on the Art of War (1632)

Tree

“A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears. On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations... To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 172.
1910, Manifesto of Futurist Painters,' April 1910

Appearance, Change, Painting

“My days among the Dead are past;
Around me I behold,
Where'er these casual eyes are cast,
The mighty minds of old;
My never-failing friends are they,
With whom I converse day by day.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

My Days Among the Dead Are Past http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1957.html, st. 1 (1818).

Past, Dead

“Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.”

Ba Jin (1904–2005) Chinese novelist

As quoted in "Literary witness to century of turmoil" in China Daily (24 November 2003)

Suffering

“Mr. Ai, we’ve seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they’d seem the same to us.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 14 “The Escape” (p. 197)

“Sahl ibn Sa'd as-Sa'idi reported that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "If this world had been worth as much as a gnat's wing in the eyes of Allah, no unbeliever would have had a single drink of water from it."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 3, hadith number 477
Sunni Hadith

World, Peace, Drink, Water

“I come from a place where there are oppportunities staring you in the eye, but its looking for the people who have the heart and the courage to do it and do it right.”

Ibukun Awosika (1962) Nigerian business magnate

As quoted in Season Life Journal (16 August 2015) http://www.seasonedlifejournal.com/2015/08/16-nigerian-inspirational-quotes-of.html by Abraham Ologundudu

People, Courage, Heart

“Even the modern word "concept" means "a grasping together," implying that the mind itself, in its act of knowing, functions like the intervening hand (in contrast to its ancient counterpart, “idea,” “that which can be beheld,” which implies that the mind functions like the receiving eye). And modern science rejects, as meaningless or useless, questions that cannot be answered by the application of method. Science becomes not the representation and demonstration of truth, but an art: the art of finding the truth—or, rather, that portion of truth that lends itself to be artfully found.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Source: The Problem of Technology (1993), p. 8

Truth, Art, Idea, Question

“The British bourgeoisie
Is not born
And does not die,
But, if it is ill,
It has a frightened look in its eyes.”

Osbert Sitwell (1892–1969) British baronet

"At the House of Mrs. Kinfoot", line 49 (1919).

“For you, there might be a brighter star,
But through my eyes the light of you burns all I see.
For you, there might be another song,
But all my heart can hear is your melody.”

Stevie Wonder (1950) American musician

Another Star
Song lyrics, Songs In The Key of Life (1976)

Star, Light, Heart

“Time' has a large part to play in looking at a picture. A picture (a stupid empty surface to begin with) gets covered in the course of its creation by a rhythmically measured network of colors, lines and dots, which evokes in its final form a total of living movement. The eye jumps from a blue to red, to green (even if there is only a change of form), to a black line, suddenly comes upon a sharp white eruption, follows it, floats on to... It is impossible to take it all-in at once. Time is inseparable from surface.”

August Macke (1887–1914) German painter of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter

Quote in Macke's letter to philosopher de:Eberhard Grisebach, March 1913; as quoted by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 145

Stupidity, Color, Change, Time

“Magister Adler was deeply moved by something higher, but now when he wants to express his thoughts in words, wants to communicate, he confuses the subjective with the objective, his altered subjective state with an external event, the dawning of a light upon him with the coming into existence of something new outside him, the falling of the veil from his eyes with his having had a revelation. Subjectively his emotion is carried to the extreme; he wants to select the most powerful expression to describe it and by means of a mental deception grasps the objective qualification: having had a revelation.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

The Book of Adler, by Søren Kierkegaard, Hong 1998 p. 117
1840s, The Book on Adler (1846-1847)

Communication, Light

“Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction. He was bothered by the people who cheered him in neighboring villages, and he imagined that they were the same cheers they gave the enemy. Everywhere he met adolescents who looked at him with his own eyes, who spoke to him with his own voice, who greeted him with the same mistrust with which he greeted them, and who said they were his sons. He felt scattered about, multiplied, and more solitary than ever. He was convinced that his own officers were lying to him. He fought with the Duke of Marlborough. "The best friend a person has," he would say at that time, "is one who has just died."”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 166

People, Imagination, Lying, Solitude

“Thou warden of the western gate, above Manhattan Bay,
The fogs of doubt that hid thy face are driven clean away:
Thine eyes at last look far and clear, thou liftest high thy hand
To spread the light of liberty world-wide for every land.”

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat

Liberty Enlightening the World (1917)

World, Light

“We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind. A man will boast to one person of an action — say some sharp transaction in trade-^which he would be ashamed to own to another.”

Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American sociologist

Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 184-5 (1922)

Imagination, Personality

“Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

"The Applicant" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/applicant.html <br class="br">Ariel (1965)

Boy, Thinking, Cooking

“I think about what the readers would see first when they open the next page:what would jump into his or her eyes first?”

Takehiko Inoue (1967) Japanese artist

Thinking

“Now the entire herd had begun to wheel wider and faster along the bluff and the outermost ranks swung centrifugally over the escarpment row on row wailing and squealing and above this the howls and curses of the drovers that now upreared in the moil of flesh they tended and swept with dust had begun to assume satanic looks with their staves and wild eyes as if they were no true swineheards but disciples of darkness got among these charges to herd them to their doom.”

Cormac McCarthy book Outer Dark

Outer Dark (1968)

“To my eyes, only the ascesis of scientific rigor, this detachment from oneself which requires an objective and impartial judgment, can give us the right to implicate ourselves in history, to give it an existential sense.”

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) French historian and philosopher

À mes yeux, c’est seulement l’ascèse de la rigueur scientifique, ce détachement de soi qu’exige un jugement objectif et impartial, qui pourra nous donner le droit de nous impliquer nous-mêmes dans l’histoire, de lui donner un sens existentiel.
Preface to Nietzsche : Essai de mythologie (1990) by E. Bertram, p. 34

History, Sense

“Only because of the striving nature of men has mankind achieved what it has so far. Men are made that way; they are designed to reach out for things which they cannot see with their eyes but can only imagine. A man naturally seeks after his dream, his ideal, while women are more concerned with the here and now rather than the future, intangible realm.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

Ideal Family and Ideal World http://www.unification.net/1982/820606.html (1982-06-06)

Women, Men, Dreams, Way

“With one eye you are looking at the outside world, while with the other you are looking within yourself.”

Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) Italian painter and sculptor

Attributed without citation at History of Painters http://www.historyofpainters.com/modigliani.htm

World

“One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.
From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me.
The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

“Scanned by the eyes of this intelligence, your path will be without pits to swallow, or snares to entangle you. Environed by the arms of this protection, all artifices will be frustration, and all malice repelled.”

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) American novelist, historian and editor

Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798)

Intelligence

“A passionately lived life is not always comfortable. Going for it involves being open to all of life - the joys, the sorrows, the mundane as well as the magic, the splendid victories, the most abject defeats. You might even stop closing your eyes during the scary parts of the movie.”

Nicholas Lore (1944) American social scientist

The Pathfinder (1998)

Life, Passion, Victory, Joy

“Do not imagine that there is any bird more easily caught by decoy, nor any fish sooner fixed on the hook by wormy bait, than are all these poor fools neatly tricked into servitude by the slightest feather passed, so to speak, before their mouths. Truly it is a marvelous thing that they let themselves be caught so quickly at the slightest tickling of their fancy. Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naïvely, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.”

Étienne de La Boétie book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Part 2
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Children, People, Pleasure, Books

“Only the most ignorant people can close their eyes to the bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution which is now taking place. Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution"
1900s, The Two Tactics of Social Democracy (1905)

People, Democracy, Nature, Sense

“"5.06 AM (Every Strangers Eyes)" on The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking (Roger Waters, 1985)”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

Water

“Those true eyes
Too pure and too honest in aught to disguise
The sweet soul shining through them.”

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (1831–1891) English statesman and poet

Part ii, canto ii. Compare: "Ils sont si transparents qu’ils laissent voir votre âme" (translated: Eyes so transparent that through them the soul is seen), Theophile Gautier, The Two Beautiful Eyes.
Lucile (1860)

Soul

“Few things infuriate the ordinary citizen more than liberal attitudes to crime and criminals. And not only infuriate, but offend against justice, common sense, and fair play. The ordinary citizen is neither a brute nor a sadist; he is humane (as most liberals are not), he is compassionate when it is called for, leans over backwards to be fair, and is ready to give a second chance. But he knows the difference between right and wrong, and has an instinctive sense of the difference between right and mere legality. He believes that wrongdoing should be punished with appropriate degrees of severity; deep in his understanding lies a feeling that eye for eye and tooth for tooth is not without merit, and that the punishment should fit the crime.”

George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) English-born author of Scottish descent

Crime and Punishment. p. 142.
The Light's On At Signpost (2002)

Justice, Feeling, Understanding, Sense

“When I contemplate the green serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery whispers to me, "Thou shalt cease to be!" the angel of Death touches me with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depth of my spirit with the blood of divinity.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality

Life, Death, Angels, Feeling

“There are two allied powers in man; knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is so much of the truth seen in a distorted medium as the mind arrives at by groping, wisdom what the eye of divine vision sees in the spirit.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Jnana

Wisdom, Truth, Knowledge

“In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch. Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Prologue p. 5
The Sabbath (1951)

God, Reality, Sense

“One hundred eighty years later, we know that the eyes of the world are fixed upon us. And we must ask ourselves: what kind of an example of freedom do we give to our age? What are the true marks of our America—and what do they mean to the world?”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1950s, Address at the Philadelphia Convention Hall (1956)

Age, World, Freedom

“Glee! the great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie souls,—
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, “But the forty?
Did they come back no more?”Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye;
And the children no
further question,
And only the waves reply.”

Emily Dickinson Life, and Death, and Giants —

Life, p. 5
Collected Poems (1993)

Children, Soul, Question, Silence

“The Chinese say that we Europeans have one eye, they themselves two, all the world else is blinde.”

Robert Burton book The Anatomy of Melancholy

Ed. 6, p. 40.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

World

“The poster first of all justified its existence on the grounds of utility, and should it further aspire to beauty of line and colour, may not our hoardings claim kinship with the galleries, and the designers of affiches pose proudly in the public eye as the masters of Holland Road or Bond Street Barbizon”

Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) English illustrator and author

and, recollect, no gate money, no catalogue
The Art of the Hoarding (1894)

Money, Beauty

“A Wise man knows that much of what he says and does is commonplace and trivial. His thoughts are not all solemn and sacred in his own eyes. He is able to laugh at himself and is not offended when others make him a subject whereon to exercise their wit.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 270

Exercises

“So down to Main Street and to Fifth Street, to the long dark bars, to the King Edward Cellar, and there a girl with yellow hair and sickness in her smile. Her name was Jean, she was thin and tubercular, but she was hard too, so anxious to get my money, her languid mouth for my lips, her long fingers at my trousers, her sickly lovely eyes watching every dollar bill.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Love, Money, Smile, Girl

“I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities. But the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as "The Boneless Wonder." My parents judged that that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralising for my youthful eyes, and I have waited 50 years to see the boneless wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

A jibe at Prime Minister (and First Lord of the Treasury) Ramsay MacDonald during a speech in the House of Commons, January 28, 1931 "Trade Disputes and Trade Unions (Amendment) Bill" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1931/jan/28/trade-disputes-and-trade-unions-1#column_1021. <br class="br">The 1930s

Youth, Parent, Waiting

“The man, whose head and heart had in a desperate emergency and amidst a despairing people paved the way for their deliverance, was no more, when it became possible to carry out his design. Whether his successor Hasdrubal forbore to make the attack because the proper moment seemed to him to have not yet come, or whether, more a statesman than a general, he believed himself unequal to the conduct of the enterprise, we are unable to determine. When, at the beginning of [221 B. C], he fell by the hand of an assassin, the Carthaginian officers of the Spanish army summoned to fill his place Hannibal, the eldest son of Hamilcar. He was still a young man--born in [247 B. C], and now, therefore, in his twenty-ninth year [221 B. C]; but his had already been a life of manifold experience. His first recollections pictured to him his father fighting in a distant land and conquering on Ercte; he had keenly shared that unconquered father's feelings on the Peace of Catulus (also see Treaty of Lutatius), on the bitter return home, and throughout the horrors of the Libyan war. While yet a boy, he had followed his father to the camp; and he soon distinguished himself. His light and firmly-knit frame made him an excellent runner and fencer, and a fearless rider at full speed; the privation of sleep did not affect him, and he knew like a soldier how to enjoy or to dispense with food. Although his youth had been spent in the camp, he possessed such culture as belonged to the Phoenicians of rank in his day; in Greek, apparently after he had become a general, he made such progress under the guidance of his confidant Sosilus of Sparta as to be able to compose state papers in that language. As he grew up, he entered the army of his father, to perform his first feats of arms under the paternal eye and to see him fall in battle by his side. Thereafter he had commanded the cavalry under his sister's husband, Hasdrubal, and distinguished himself by brilliant personal bravery as well as by his talents as a leader. The voice of his comrades now summoned him--the tried, although youthful general--to the chief command, and he could now execute the designs for which his father and his brother-in-law had lived and died. He took up the inheritance, and he was worthy of it. His contemporaries tried to cast stains of various sorts on his character; the Romans charged him with cruelty, the Carthaginians with covetousness; and it is true that he hated as only Oriental natures know how to hate, and that a general who never fell short of money and stores can hardly have been other than covetous. But though anger and envy and meanness have written his history, they have not been able to mar the pure and noble image which it presents. Laying aside wretched inventions which furnish their own refutation, and some things which his lieutenants, particularly Hannibal Monomachus and Mago the Sammite, were guilty of doing in his name, nothing occurs in the accounts regarding him which may not be justified under the circumstances, and according to the international law, of the times; and all agree in this, that he combined in rare perfection discretion and enthusiasm, caution and energy. He was peculiarly marked by that inventive craftiness, which forms one of the leading traits of the Phoenician character; he was fond of taking singular and unexpected routes; ambushes and stratagems of all sorts were familiar to him; and he studied the character of his antagonists with unprecedented care. By an unrivaled system of espionage--he had regular spies even in Rome--he kept himself informed of the projects of the enemy; he himself was frequently seen wearing disguises and false hair, in order to procure information on some point or other. Every page of the history of this period attests his genius in strategy; and his gifts as a statesman were, after the peace with Rome, no less conspicuously displayed in his reform of the Carthaginian constitution, and in the unparalleled influence which as a foreign exile he exercised in the cabinets of the eastern powers. The power which he wielded over men is shown by his incomparable control over an army of various nations and many tongues--an army which never in the worst times mutinied against him. He was a great man; wherever he went, he riveted the eyes of all.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

The History of Rome, Volume 2 Translated by W.P. Dickson
On Hannibal the man and soldier
The History of Rome - Volume 2

Life, Men, Money, Hate

“This is indeed a maxim of general application…Nations cannot be governed by the obligations of friendship which prevail among individuals in private life…There can be, in the eyes of a philosophical statesman neither national enmities, nor national friendships.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Letter to Lord Palmerston (9 October 1833), quoted in E. A. Smith, Lord Grey. 1764-1845 (Alan Sutton, 1996), p. 284.
1830s

Life, Friendship

“Is it all in that pretty little head of yours?
What goes on in that place in the dark?
Well I used to know a girl and I would have
sworn that her name was Veronica
Well she used to have a carefree mind of her
own and a delicate look in her eye
These days I'm afraid she's not even sure if her
name is Veronica.”

Elvis Costello (1954) English singer-songwriter

Veronica, written by Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney
Song lyrics, Spike (1989)

Girl

“A sparkle was in his eye, but his life was in his hand.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Tonight's the Night
Song lyrics, Tonight's the Night (1975)

Life

“In the east the day was reddening,
When the warriors pass'd;
In the west the night was deadening,
As they looked their last;
As they looked their last on him —
He, their comrade — their commander —
He, the earth's adored —
He, the godlike Alexander!
Who can wield his sword?
As they went their eyes were dim,
The silver-shielded warriors,
The warriors of the world!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1835-3) (Vol.45) Deathbed of Alexander the Great
The Monthly Magazine

World, Night

“Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish’d at me.
Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God. the Human Imagination”

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

Source: 1800s, Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion (c. 1803–1820), Ch. 1, plate 5, lines 16-20 The Words of Blake

God, World, Imagination, Forgiveness

“Send home my long strayed eyes to me,
Which (Oh) too long have dwelt on thee.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

The Message, stanza 1

Home

“The imperial heroes who rule over the opinions of their fellow men for good or ill, are victory-organized; they march towards the execution of their purpose, as if they were intent on the conquest of a world. With a bold front and piercing eye, they are repelled by no obstacles, and entertain not the slightest doubt as to a final triumph; days and nights, like their fortune, health, and every thing dear in existence, they consecrate to the success of their particular enterprise. As with hooks of steel, they grapple the most stubborn difficulties, and relax neither hand nor foot so long as there remains one vital energy in their will.”

Elias Lyman Magoon (1810–1886) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 451.

Men, Health, World, Success

“If from the wilderness the righteous and honest John were actually to come who, clothed in skins and living on locusts and untouched by all the terrible mischief, were meanwhile to apply himself with a pure heart and in all seriousness to the investigation of truth and to offer the fruits thereof, what kind of reception would he have to expect from those businessmen of the chair, who are hired for State purposes and with wife and family have to live on philosophy, and whose watchword is, therefore, Primum vivere, deinde philosophari [first live and then philosophize]? These men have accordingly taken possession of the market and have already seen to it that here nothing is of value except what they allow; consequently merit exists only in so far as they and their mediocrity are pleased to acknowledge it. They thus have on a leading rein the attention of that small public, such as it is, that is concerned with philosophy. For on matters that do not promise, like the productions of poetry, amusement and entertainment but only instruction, and financially unprofitable instruction at that, that public will certainly not waste its time, effort, and energy, without first being thoroughly assured that such efforts will be richly rewarded. Now by virtue of its inherited belief that whoever lives by a business knows all about it, this public expects an assurance from the professional men who from professor’s chairs and in compendiums, journals, and literary periodicals, confidently behave as if they were the real masters of the subject. Accordingly, the public allows them to sample and select whatever is worth noting and what can be ignored. My poor John from the wilderness, how will you fare if, as is to be expected, what you bring is not drafted in accordance with the tacit convention of the gentlemen of the lucrative philosophy? They will regard you as one who has not entered in the spirit of the game and thus threatens to spoil the fun for all of them; consequently, they will regard you as their common enemy and antagonist. Now even if what you bring were the greatest masterpiece of the human mind, it could never find favor in their eyes. For it would not be drawn up ad normam conventionis [according to the current pattern]; and so it would not be such as to enable them to make it the subject of their lectures from the chair in order to make a living from it. It never occurs to a professor of philosophy to examine a new system that appears to see whether it is true; but he at once tests it merely to see whether it can be brought into harmony with the doctrines of the established religion, with government plans, and with the prevailing views of the times.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, pp. 160-161, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 148-149
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), On Philosophy in the Universities

Men, Truth, Family, Religion

“[F]or more than three years this Congress, which has been given the name “The Do-Nothing Congress,” has turned a blind eye to the intractable war in Iraq, ignoring the Administration’s many mistakes, allowing it to stay a failed course. Here we are with six days left in the 109th Congress, and the Republicans, which control the House and the Senate and the White House, have not held one hearing, not one, into the President’s wartime failures.”

Harry Reid (1939) American politician

"Reid: America Deserves Accountability for Iraq Contracting Abuses" http://democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/record.cfm?id=263222&, Senate Democratic Caucus website, September 18, 2006 (accessed 2006-09-21)

War, Failure, Housing

“…love is in the eyes, and one woman knows when another woman is in love.”

David Gemmell book The King Beyond the Gate

Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 22

Love