Quotes about vision
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Mark Millar photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
Ezra Pound photo

“Glance is the enemy of vision.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic
Edith Wharton photo
Václav Havel photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History
Context: The difference between men is in their principle of association. Some men classify objects by color and size and other accidents of appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.

Helen Keller photo
Lisa Scottoline photo

“If you think I’m handsome, there’s obviously nothing wrong with your vision.”

Lisa Scottoline (1955) American writer

Source: Every Fifteen Minutes

Thomas Hardy photo
Charlaine Harris photo
Helen Keller photo
Elizabeth Barrett Browning photo
Jodi Picoult photo
Stephen R. Covey photo

“The core of any family is what is changeless, what is going to be there──shared vision and values.”

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Robert F. Kennedy photo

“Of course to adhere to standards, to idealism, to vision in the face of immediate dangers takes great courage and takes self-confidence. But we also know that only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Day of Affirmation Address (1966)
Context: The second danger is that of expediency: of those who say that hopes and beliefs must bend before immediate necessities. Of course, if we must act effectively we must deal with the world as it is. We must get things done. But if there was one thing that President Kennedy stood for that touched the most profound feeling of young people around the world, it was the belief that idealism, high aspirations, and deep convictions are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient of programs — that there is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic possibilities, no separation between the deepest desires of heart and of mind and the rational application of human effort to human problems. It is not realistic or hardheaded to solve problems and take action unguided by ultimate moral aims and values, although we all know some who claim that it is so. In my judgment, it is thoughtless folly. For it ignores the realities of human faith and of passion and of belief — forces ultimately more powerful than all of the calculations of our economists or of our generals. Of course to adhere to standards, to idealism, to vision in the face of immediate dangers takes great courage and takes self-confidence. But we also know that only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly.

Bono photo
Jonathan Swift photo

“Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Thoughts on various subjects (Further thoughts on various subjects) (1745)

Sylvia Plath photo
Ayn Rand photo
Victor Hugo photo
Judith Butler photo
Philip K. Dick photo
Ansel Adams photo
Orson Welles photo
Allen Ginsberg photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Rachel Caine photo
Anaïs Nin photo

“My first vision of earth was water veiled.”

Source: House of Incest (1936)
Context: My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea and my eyes are the color of water. I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self. I remember my first birth in water.

William Golding photo

“At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.”

Source: The Spire

James Patterson photo
James Allen photo
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo
Neil deGrasse Tyson photo
Wendell Berry photo
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley photo
George Eliot photo
Oswald Chambers photo
Alan Moore photo
Jack Kerouac photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Emma Goldman photo

“Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

"Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap", a lecture (c. 1912), published in Red Emma Speaks, Part 1 (1972) edited by Alix Kates Shulman

Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo
James Joyce photo
Sophie Kinsella photo
Willa Shalit photo

“Try to see yourself with power. Not power so that you can get even with anybody else. Power so that you can become even with your vision- Maya Angelo”

Willa Shalit (1955) American artist

Source: Becoming Myself: Reflections on Growing Up Female

David Foster Wallace photo
Frank Herbert photo
Ambrose Bierce photo

“Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

Ilchi Lee photo
Jeanette Winterson photo
Robert Anton Wilson photo
Aldous Huxley photo
Charlaine Harris photo
T.S. Eliot photo

“Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Context: There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands,
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Kim Harrison photo
Diana Gabaldon photo
John Keats photo
Anaïs Nin photo
Helen Keller photo

“As selfishness and complaint pervert and cloud the mind, so sex with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.”

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

Source: My Religion

Norman Mailer photo

“Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.”

Preface
The Presidential Papers (1963)
Context: Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.

Marilynne Robinson photo
Don DeLillo photo

“Your vision of where or who you want to be is the greatest asset you have. Without having a goal it’s difficult to score.”

Paul Arden (1940–2008) writer

Source: It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be

Edward Hopper photo

“Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world... The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

1941 - 1967
Source: 'Statements by Four artists', Edward Hopper, in 'Reality' 1., Spring 1953, p. 8

Haruki Murakami photo
Shane Claiborne photo
Garth Nix photo
Salman Rushdie photo
John F. Kennedy photo

“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Speech at Amherst College
Context: If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
Context: If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having "nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope."

James C. Collins photo

“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”

James C. Collins (1958) American business consultant and writer

Source: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

Ayn Rand photo
Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Carl Sagan photo

“The visions we offer our children shape the future.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator
Henry Adams photo
Jack Kerouac photo
Carl Sagan photo
Lyndon B. Johnson photo
Anthony Giddens photo

“This situation [alienation] can therefore [according to Durkheim] be remedied by providing the individual with a moral awareness of the social importance of his particular role in the division of labour. He is then no longer an alienated automaton. but is a useful part of an organic whole: ‘from that time, as special and uniform as his activity may be, it is that of an intelligent being, for it has direction, and he is aware of it.’ This is entirely consistent with Durkheim’s general account of the growth of the division of labour, and its relationship to human freedom. It is only through moral acceptance in his particular role in the division of labour that the individual is able to achieve a high degree of autonomy as a self-conscious being, and can escape both the tyranny of rigid moral conformity demanded in undifferentiated societies on the one hand and the tyranny of unrealisable desires on the other.
Not the moral integration of the individual within a differentiated division of labour but the effective dissolution of the division of labour as an organising principle of human social intercourse, is the premise of Marx’s conception. Marx nowhere specifies in detail how this future society would be organised socially, but, at any rate,. this perspective differs decisively from that of Durkheim. The vision of a highly differentiated division of labour integrated upon the basis of moral norms of individual obligation and corporate solidarity. is quite at variance with Marx’s anticipation of the future form of society.
According to Durkheim’s standpoint. the criteria underlying Marx’s hopes for the elimination of technological alienation represent a reversion to moral principles which are no longer appropriate to the modern form of society. This is exactly the problem which Durkheim poses at the opening of The Division of Labour: ‘Is it our duty to seek to become a thorough and complete human being. one quite sufficient unto himself; or, on the contrary, to be only a part of a whole, the organ of an organism?’ The analysis contained in the work, in Durkheim’s view, demonstrates conclusively that organic solidarity is the ‘normal’ type in modern societies, and consequently that the era of the ‘universal man’ is finished. The latter ideal, which predominated up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in western Europe is incompatible with the diversity of the contemporary order. In preserving this ideal. by contrast. Marx argues the obverse: that the tendencies which are leading to the destruction of capitalism are themselves capable of effecting a recovery of the ‘universal’ properties of man. which are shared by every individual.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

Source: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), pp. 230-231.

Florence Scovel Shinn photo

“Every great work, every big accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement.”

Florence Scovel Shinn (1871–1940) American writer

The Game of Life and How to Play It https://archive.org/details/gameoflifehowtop00shin (1925)

Yves Klein photo
Marshall Goldsmith photo
Pauline Kael photo

“I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

John F. Kennedy, address at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1963-10-26).
Misattributed

Dinah Craik photo
Nigel Cumberland photo

“The most successful people in the workplace are those who normally really like and ‘buy-into’ their employer’s mission and vision. In other words such people like what the company wishes to achieve and where it is heading. It is akin to being on a ship and liking what the ship is doing and liking where the ship is heading. Can you imagine being on a ship and not wishing to go where it is heading?”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Page 62
Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, Managing Teams in a Week (2013) https://books.google.ae/books?idqZjO9_ov74EC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIIDAB#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, Secrets of Success at Work – 50 techniques to excel (2014) https://books.google.ae/books?id4S7vAgAAQBAJ&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIJjAC#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse

“At a given time some concrete forms are simply there in vision, not less than colors and brightnesses.”

Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) German-American psychologist and phenomenologist

Source: Gestalt Psychology. 1930, p. 150