Quotes about sight

A collection of quotes on the topic of sight, use, doing, other.

Quotes about sight

Keanu Reeves photo
William Faulkner photo
Jack Welch photo

“When the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is in sight.”

Jack Welch (1935) American executive: General Electric CEO

Variant: If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.

Vladimir Nabokov photo
Meister Eckhart photo

“The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.”

Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) German theologian

Sermon IV : True Hearing
Meister Eckhart’s Sermons (1909)
Context: The man who abides in the will of God wills nothing else than what God is, and what He wills. If he were ill he would not wish to be well. If he really abides in God's will, all pain is to him a joy, all complication, simple: yea, even the pains of hell would be a joy to him. He is free and gone out from himself, and from all that he receives, he must be free. If my eye is to discern colour, it must itself be free from all colour. The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.

Claude Monet photo

“I have gone back to some things that can't possibly be done: water, with weeds waving at the bottom. It is a wonderful sight, but it drives one to crazy to try to paint it. But that is the kind of thing I am always a tackling.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

Quote in Monet's letter to art-critic and his friend Gustave Geffroy, 22 June 1890; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 129
1890 - 1900

Marie Curie photo

“All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.”

Marie Curie (1867–1934) French-Polish physicist and chemist

Pierre Curie (1923), as translated by Charlotte Kellogg and Vernon Lyman Kellogg, p. 162

Emily Brontë photo
William Shakespeare photo
Helena Bonham Carter photo
Leonardo DiCaprio photo

“With Romeo and Juliet, you're talking about two people who meet one night, and get married the same night. I believe in love at first sight-but it hasn't happened to me yet.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) American actor and film producer

http://www.popmonk.com/actors/leonardo-dicaprio/quotes-leonardo-dicaprio.htm

Empedocles photo

“The sight of both [eyes] becomes one.”

fr. 88
On Nature

Dante Alighieri photo
Sitting Bull photo

“Because I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans; in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit. It is not necessary, that eagles should be crows.”

Sitting Bull (1831–1890) Hunkpapa Lakota medicine man and holy man

Quoted in Vine Deloria, God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. Golden, Colo: Fulcrum Pub, 2003, cited to Virginia Armstrong, I have spoken; American history through the voices of the Indians. Chicago, Sage Books, 1971.

H.P. Lovecraft photo

“I can better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was—wrapped up in the arts, the natural (not social) sciences, the externals of history & antiquarianism, the abstract academic phases of philosophy, & so on—all the one-sided standard lore to which, according to the traditions of the dying order, a liberal education was limited. God! the things that were left out—the inside facts of history, the rational interpretation of periodic social crises, the foundations of economics & sociology, the actual state of the world today … & above all, the habit of applying disinterested reason to problems hitherto approached only with traditional genuflections, flag-waving, & callous shoulder-shrugs! All this comes up with humiliating force through an incident of a few days ago—when young Conover, having established contact with Henneberger, the ex-owner of WT, obtained from the latter a long epistle which I wrote Edwin Baird on Feby. 3, 1924, in response to a request for biographical & personal data. Little Willis asked permission to publish the text in his combined SFC-Fantasy, & I began looking the thing over to see what it was like—for I had not the least recollection of ever having penned it. Well …. I managed to get through, after about 10 closely typed pages of egotistical reminiscences & showing-off & expressions of opinion about mankind & the universe. I did not faint—but I looked around for a 1924 photograph of myself to burn, spit on, or stick pins in! Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 … only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snobbish, self-centred, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better! That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get around more in 1920, is hardly much of an excuse. Well—there was nothing to be done … except to rush a note back to Conover & tell him I'd dismember him & run the fragments through a sausage-grinder if he ever thought of printing such a thing! The only consolation lay in the reflection that I had matured a bit since '24. It's hard to have done all one's growing up since 33—but that's a damn sight better than not growing up at all.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Catherine L. Moore (7 February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 407-408
Non-Fiction, Letters

Hasan al-Basri photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Thomas Mann photo

“This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected — in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

"Early Sorrow" in Tellers of Tales : 100 Short Stories from the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany edited by William Somerset Maugham (1939), p. 884

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
Marcus Aurelius photo
George Orwell photo
Socrates photo
Louis IX of France photo

“I would rather have a Scot come from Scotland to govern the people of this kingdom well and justly than that you should govern them ill in the sight of all the world.”

Louis IX of France (1214–1270) King of France

Je ameroie mieus que uns Escoz venist d'Escosse et gouvernast le peuple du royaume bien et loyaument, que que tu le gouvernasses mal apertement.
Page 167. http://users.skynet.be/antoine.mechelynck/chroniq/joinv/JV003.htm
Speaking to his eldest son, Louis.
Jean de Joinville Livre des saintes paroles et des bons faiz nostre roy saint Looys

George Orwell photo
José Saramago photo
Saint Peter photo
Hasan ibn Ali photo

“Thought, meditation and pondering is the life of clear sighted people”

Hasan ibn Ali (624–669) Shia Imam

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.72, p. 115
Regarding Knowledge

George Orwell photo
Socrates photo
Sappho photo
George Orwell photo
Rita Levi-Montalcini photo

“I have lost a bit of my sight, much of my hearing. At conferences, I can't see the presentations and can't hear well. But I think more now than when I when I was twenty. The body can do whatever it likes. I am not the body: I am the mind.”

Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012) Italian neurologist

Source: In an interview with Paolo Giordano, 100 anni di futuro, Wired, n. 1, marzo 2009.
Source: Cited by Elisabetta Intini, Addio alla signora della scienza, le sue frasi più belle http://www.focus.it/scienza/addio-alla-signora-della-scienza-le-sue-frasi-piu-belle, Focus.it, 31 dicembre 2012.
Source: Cited in Addio Rita Levi Montalcini, le frasi più belle di un genio gentile http://www.vanityfair.it/news/italia/12/12/30/rita-levi-montalcini-morta-frasi, VanityFair.it, 30 dicembre 2012.

Eckhart Tolle photo
Carlos Ruiz Zafón photo
Henry Miller photo
Dilgo Khyentse photo
Galileo Galilei photo

“It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

Source: The Starry Messenger, Venice 1610: "From Doubt to Astonishment"

Stephen Chbosky photo
Jennifer Donnelly photo
Orhan Pamuk photo

“Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.”

Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient

Source: My Name is Red

Terry Pratchett photo
Jonathan Edwards photo
Alexander Pope photo

“Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.”

Canto V, line 33.
Variant: Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;
Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
Source: The Rape of the Lock (1712, revised 1714 and 1717)

Terry Pratchett photo
John Berger photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
William Shakespeare photo

“Out of my sight! Thou dost infect mine eyes.”

Source: Richard III

Julia Quinn photo
Tupac Shakur photo
Mark Twain photo

“There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Variant: There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.

Rabindranath Tagore photo

“Alas, why are my nights all thus lost? Ah, why do I ever miss his
sight whose breath touches my sleep?”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Source: Gitanjali: Song Offerings

Francesca Lia Block photo
Rainer Maria Rilke photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo
Albert Schweitzer photo
Corrie ten Boom photo

“Surely there is no more wretched sight that the human body unloved and uncared for.”

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

Source: The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

Alexandre Dumas photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“Worldly Wisdom

Do not stay in the field!
Nor climb out of sight.
The best view of the world
Is from a medium height.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Source: The Gay Science

Walter Dean Myers photo
Rabindranath Tagore photo
John of Damascus photo

“Images are books for the illiterate and silent heralds of the honor of the saints, teaching those who see with a soundless voice and sanctifying the sight.”

John of Damascus (676–749) hymnodist at Mar Saba, Greek Church father, Eastern Orthodox Saint

"Defense against those who attack the holy images," as translated by Andrew Louth, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, (Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press: 2003) p. 46

Thomas Paine photo
Robert Browning photo
Nikola Tesla photo
Napoleon I of France photo

“The genius continually discovers fate, and the more profound the genius, the more profound the discovery of fate. To spiritlessness, this is naturally foolishness, but in actuality it is greatness, because no man is born with the idea of providence, and those who think that one acquires it gradually though education are greatly mistaken, although I do not thereby deny the significance of education. Not until sin is reached is providence posited. Therefore the genius has an enormous struggle to reach providence. If he does not reach it, truly he becomes a subject for the study of fate. The genius is an omnipotent Ansich [in itself] which as such would rock the whole world. For the sake of order, another figure appears along with him, namely fate. Fate is nothing. It is the genius himself who discovers it, and the more profound the genius, the more profoundly he discovers fate, because that figure is merely the anticipation of providence. If he continues to be merely a genius and turns outward, he will accomplish astonishing things; nevertheless, he will always succumb to fate, if not outwardly, so that it is tangible and visible to all, then inwardly. Therefore, a genius-existence is always like a fairy tale if in the deepest sense the genius does not turn inward into himself. The genius is able to do all things, and yet he is dependent upon an insignificance that no one comprehends, an insignificance upon which the genius himself by his omnipotence bestows omnipotent significance. Therefore, a second lieutenant, if he is a genius, is able to become an emperor and change the world, so that there becomes one empire and one emperor. But therefore, too, the army may be drawn up for battle, the conditions for the battle absolutely favorable, and yet in the next moment wasted; a kingdom of heroes may plead that the order for battle be given-but he cannot; he must wait for the fourteenth of June. And why? Because that was the date of the battle of Marengo. So all things may be in readiness, he himself stands before the legions, waiting only for the sun to rise in order to announce the time for the oration that will electrify the soldiers, and the sun may rise more glorious than ever, an inspiring and inflaming sight for all, only not for him, because the sun did not rise as glorious as this at Austerlitz, and only the sun of Austerlitz gives victory and inspiration. Thus, the inexplicable passion with which such a one may often rage against an entirely insignificant man, when otherwise he may show humanity and kindness even toward his enemies. Yes, woe unto the man, woe unto the woman, woe unto the innocent child, woe unto the beast of the field, woe unto the bird whose flight, woe unto the tree whose branch comes in his way at the moment he is to interpret his omen.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Søren Kierkegaard The Concept of Anxiety, Nichol p. 98-100 (1844)
About

Jeremy Clarkson photo
Statius photo

“Hear oh hear, if my prayer be worthy and such as you yourself might whisper to my frenzy. Those I begot (no matter in what bed) did not try to guide me, bereft of sight and sceptre, or sway my grieving with words. Nay behold (ah agony!), in their pride, kings this while by my calamity, they even mock my darkness, impatient of their father's groans. Even to them am I unclean? And does the sire of the gods see it and do naught? Do you at least, my rightful champion, come hither and range all my progeny for punishment. Put on your head this gore-soaked diadem that I tore off with my bloody nails. Spurred by a father's prayers, go against the brothers, go between them, let steel make partnership of blood fly asunder. Queen of Tartarus' pit, grant the wickedness I would fain see.”
Exaudi, si digna precor quaeque ipsa furenti subiceres. orbum visu regnisque carentem non regere aut dictis maerentem flectere adorti, quos genui quocumque toro; quin ecce superbi —pro dolor!—et nostro jamdudum funere reges insultant tenebris gemitusque odere paternos. hisne etiam funestus ego? et videt ista deorum ignavus genitor? tu saltem debita vindex huc ades et totos in poenam ordire nepotes. indue quod madidum tabo diadema cruentis unguibus abripui, votisque instincta paternis i media in fratres, generis consortia ferro dissiliant. da, Tartarei regina barathri, quod cupiam vidisse nefas.

Source: Thebaid, Book I, Line 73

Galileo Galilei photo

“I have been in my bed for five weeks, oppressed with weakness and other infirmities from which my age, seventy four years, permits me not to hope release. Added to this (proh dolor! [O misery! ]) the sight of my right eye — that eye whose labors (dare I say it) have had such glorious results — is for ever lost. That of the left, which was and is imperfect, is rendered null by continual weeping.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

Letter to Élie Diodati (4 July 1637), as translated in The Private Life of Galileo : Compiled primarily from his correspondence and that of his eldest daughter, Sister Maria Celeste (1870) http://books.google.com/books?id=ixUCAAAAYAAJ by Mary Allan-Olney, p. 278
Other quotes

Socrates photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo

“I do differ from you radically in respect to familiar things & scenes; for I always demand close correlation with the landscape & historic stream to which I belong, & would feel completely lost in infinity without a system of reference-points based on known & accustomed objects. I take complete relativity so much for granted, that I cannot conceive of anything as existing in itself in any recognisable form. What gives things an aspect & quasi-significance to us is the fact that we view things consistently from a certain artificial & fortuitous angle. Without the preservation of that angle, coherent consciousness & entity itself becomes inconceivable. Thus my wish for freedom is not so much a wish to put all terrestrial things behind me & plunge forever into abysses beyond light, matter, & energy. That, indeed, would mean annihilation as a personality rather than liberation. My wish is perhaps best defined as a wish for infinite visioning & voyaging power, yet without loss of the familiar background which gives all things significance. I want to know what stretches Outside, & be able to visit all the gulfs & dimensions beyond Space & Time. I want, too, to juggle the calendar at will; bringing things from the immemorial past down into the present, & making long journeys into the forgotten years. But I want the familiar Old Providence of my childhood as a perpetual base for these necromancies & excursions—& in a good part of these necromancies & excursions I want certain transmuted features of Old Providence to form part of the alien voids I visit or conjure up. I am as geographic-minded as a cat—places are everything to me. Long observation has shewn me that no other objective experience can give me even a quarter of the kick I can extract from the sight of a fresh landscape or urban vista whose antiquity & historic linkages are such as to correspond with certain fixed childhood dream-patterns of mine. Of course my twilight cosmos of half-familiar, fleetingly remembered marvels is just as unattainable as your Ultimate Abysses—this being the real secret of its fascination. Nothing really known can continue to be acutely fascinating—the charm of many familiar things being mainly resident in their power to symbolise or suggest unknown extensions & overtones.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (7 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 214
Non-Fiction, Letters

Henri Barbusse photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo
John Chrysostom photo

“Just as maniacs, who never enjoy tranquility, so also he who is resentful and retains an enemy will never have the enjoyment of any peace; incessantly raging and daily increasing the tempest of his thoughts calling to mind his words and acts, and detesting the very name of him who has aggrieved him. Do you but mention his enemy, he becomes furious at once, and sustains much inward anguish; and should he chance to get only a bare sight of him, he fears and trembles, as if encountering the worst evils, Indeed, if he perceives any of his relations, if but his garment, or his dwelling, or street, he is tormented by the sight of them. For as in the case of those who are beloved, their faces, their garments, their sandals, their houses, or streets, excite us, the instant we behold them; so also should we observe a servant, or friend, or house, or street, or any thing else belonging to those We hate and hold our enemies, we are stung by all these things; and the strokes we endure from the sight of each one of them are frequent and continual. What is the need then of sustaining such a siege, such torment and such punishment? For if hell did not threaten the resentful, yet for the very torment resulting from the thing itself we ought to forgive the offences of those who have aggrieved us. But when deathless punishments remain behind, what can be more senseless than the man, who both here and there brings punishment upon himself, while he thinks to be revenged upon his enemy!”

John Chrysostom (349–407) important Early Church Father

Homilies on the Statues http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf109/Page_474.html, Homily XX

Oscar Wilde photo

“It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

The Critic as Artist (1891), Part I

Aurelius Augustinus photo
Jules Verne photo

“Hobson perceived with some alarm that bears were very numerous in the neighbourhood and that scarcely a day passed without one or more of them being sighted. Sometimes these unwelcome visitors belonged to the family of brown bears, so common throughout the whole "Cursed Land"; but now and then a solitary specimen of the formidable Polar bear warned the hunters what dangers they might have to encounter as soon as the first frost should drive great numbers of these fearful animals to the neighborhood of Cape Bathurst. Every book of Arctic explorations is full of accounts of the frequent perils in which travelers and whalers are exposed from the ferocity of these animals.”

Hobson constata, non sans une certaine appréhension, que les ours étaient nombreux sur cette partie du territoire. Il était rare, en effet, qu'un jour se passât sans qu'un couple de ces formidables carnassiers ne fût signalé. Bien des coups de fusil furent adressés à ces terribles visiteurs. Tantôt, c'était une bande de ces ours bruns qui sont fort communs sur toute la région de la Terre-Maudite, tantôt, une de ces familles d'ours polaires d'une taille gigantesque, que les premiers froids amèneraient sans doute en plus grand nombre aux environs du cap Bathurst. Et, en effet, dans les récits d'hivernage, on peut observer que les explorateurs ou les baleiniers sont plusieurs fois par jour exposés à la rencontre de ces carnassiers.
Source: The Fur Country, or Seventy Degrees North Latitude (1872), Ch. 14: Some Excursions

Claude Monet photo
Barack Obama photo
Hans-Hermann Hoppe photo
William Byrd photo
Abraham Lincoln photo

“The Republican principle, the unalterable principle, never to be lost sight of, is that slavery is wrong.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Speech https://diplomatdc.wordpress.com/2010/06/05/the-libertarian-attack-on-abraham-lincoln-by-gregory-hilton/ (1859)
1850s

Bede photo

“The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.”
Talis...mihi uidetur, rex, vita hominum praesens in terris, ad conparationem eius, quod nobis incertum est, temporis, quale cum te residente ad caenam cum ducibus ac ministris tuis tempore brumali, accenso quidem foco in medio, et calido effecto caenaculo, furentibus autem foris per omnia turbinibus hiemalium pluviarum vel nivium, adveniens unus passeium domum citissime pervolaverit; qui cum per unum ostium ingrediens, mox per aliud exierit. Ipso quidem tempore, quo intus est, hiemis tempestate non tangitur, sed tamen parvissimo spatio serenitatis ad momentum excurso, mox de hieme in hiemem regrediens, tuis oculis elabitur. Ita haec vita hominum ad modicum apparet; quid autem sequatur, quidue praecesserit, prorsus ignoramus. Unde si haec nova doctrina certius aliquid attulit, merito esse sequenda videtur.

Book II, chapter 13
This, Bede tells us, was the advice given to Edwin, King of Northumbria by one of his chief men, at a meeting where the king proposed that he and his followers should convert to Christianity. It followed a speech by the chief priest Coifi, who also spoke in favor of conversion.
Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People)

John Venn photo
Ramana Maharshi photo
Ovid photo

“Thus, while the mute creation downward bend
Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes
Beholds his own hereditary skies.”

Pronaque quum spectent animalia cetera terram, Os homini sublime dedit, coelumque tueri Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus.

Book I, 84 (as translated by John Dryden)
Metamorphoses (Transformations)

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“There is something laughable about the sight of authors who enjoy the rustling folds of long and involved sentences: they are trying to cover up their feet.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Sec. 282
The Gay Science (1882)

Theodore Roosevelt photo
Julian of Norwich photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo
Rabindranath Tagore photo

“In this playhouse of infinite forms I have had my play, and here have I caught sight of him that is formless.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

96
Gitanjali http://www.spiritualbee.com/gitanjali-poems-of-tagore/ (1912)

Ed Sheeran photo

“I'm out of sight, I'm out of mind
I'll do it all for you in time
And out of all these things I've done I think I love you better now.”

Ed Sheeran (1991) English singer-songwriter and producer

Lego House, written with Jake Gosling and Chris Leonard.
Song lyrics, + (2011)

Leonardo Da Vinci photo
V.S. Naipaul photo