Quotes About Seeing Clearly

“[Seeing clearly] is not so difficult to achieve, and yet it is rather unusual. To my mind, it is less a question of an exalted or shrewd intelligence than of good sense, goodwill and a certain sort of courage to enable one to rise above both the pressures of one's environment and the natural inclination to close one's eyes to facts, a temptation that arises from our immediate interests and from the fear which problems inspire in us. A French essayist has said: 'What is terrible when you seek the truth, is that you find it.' You find it, and then you are no longer free to follow the biases of your personal circle, or to accept fashionable cliches.”

— Victor Serge

“No, Mo," Miss Watkins said, turning to Nesta who was crying with laughter. "Nesta Williams, seeing as you clearly find it so funny. What do you think the name of God might be?"
"Er, not sure," said Nesta, looking caught out. "What do you think?"
"I don't think," said Miss Watkins."I know."
"I don't think I know either," giggled Nesta. The whole class got detention, but it was worth it. I felt like i'd spent the whole morning laughing my head off
We never did get to know what God's name was.”

— Cathy Hopkins

“I'd forgotten how enlivening it could feel, seeing clearly and far. Aridity frees light. It also unleashes grandeur. The earth here wasn't cloaked in forest, nor draped in green. Green was pastoral, peaceful, mild. Desert beauty was "sublime" in the way that the romantic poets had used the word- not peaceful dales but rugged mountain faces, not reassuring but daunting nature, the earth's skin and haunches, its spines and angles arching prehistorically in sunlight.”

— Julene Bair

“Throughout my life I have seen, without one exception, narrow-shouldered men performing innumerable idiotic acts, brustalising their fellows, and corrupted souls by every means. They call the motive for their actions: fame. Seeing these exhibitions I've longed to laugh, with the rest, but that strange imitation was impossible. Taking a penknife with a sharp-edged blade, I slit the flesh at the points joining the lips. For an instant I believed my aim was achieved. I saw in a mirror the mouth ruined at my own will! An error! Besides, the blood gushing freely from the two wounds prevented my distinguishing whether this really was the grin of others. But after some moments of comparison I saw quite clearly that my smile did not resemble that of humans: the fact is, I was not laughing.”

— Comte De Lautréamont

“After sex, all animals are sad; after any kind of pleasure, really. We're not built for pleasure. We're built for agony and for seeing things too clearly, which is often a terrible agony in itself. I loathed myself then, and I loathed myself now. Dr.”

— George Alec Effinger

“She held out her hand, like a man. He hesitated, then took the hand and shook it. It was very warm. You could not help but be aware of the wild passage of blood on the other side of its wall, veins, capillaries, sweat glands, tiny factories in the throes of complicated manufacture. [He] looked at the eyes and, knowing how eyes worked, was astonished, not for the first time, at the infinite complexity of Creation, wondering how this thing, this instrument for seeing, could transmit so clearly its entreaty while at the same time--Look, I am only an eye--denying that it was doing anything of the sort.”

— Peter Carey

“Sometimes what seems like surrender isn't surrender at all. It's about what's going on in our hearts. About seeing clearly the way life is and accepting it and being true to it, whatever the pain, because the pain of not being true to it is far, far greater.”

— Nicholas Evans

“She's like smoke:you think you're seeing her clearly enough,but when you reach for her there's nothing there”

— RyÅ« Murakami

“Since you always lived inside your own head, you were much better at seeing the truth about others than you ever were at seeing yourself. So you navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives - often surprising to you - helped you to guide your life. So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail. In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others. And now that you've left the Earth, you are stored in scattered heads around the globe. Here in this Purgatory, all the people with whom you've ever come in contact are gathered. The scattered bits of you are collected, pooled, and unified. The mirrors are held up in front of you. Without the benefit of filtration, you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you.”

— David Eagleman

“Becoming "awake" involves seeing our confusion more clearly.”

— Chgyam Trungpa

“Truth be told, it hurt when I fell in love with Tack over tequila and he kicked me out of bed. But until that moment, I didn't realize the hurt that burned deeper was seeing him with the brunette only a day later. He'd explained it. I hadn't made an impression on him, and clearly that had changed since.”

— Kristen Ashley

“We are seeing the cells of plants and animals more and more clearly as chemical factories, where the various products are manufactured in separate workshops.”

— Eduard Buchner

“Seeing clearly means that you're smart enough to know when a project is doomed, or brave enough to persevere when your colleagues are fleeing for the hills. Abandoning your worldview in order to try on someone else's is the first step in being able to see things as they are.”

— Seth Godin

“It is the gift of seeing the life around them clearly and vividly, as something that is exciting in its own right. It is an innate gift, varying in intensity with the individual's temperament and environment.”

— Bill Brandt

“Infatuation's just another word for not seeing clearly. When you start to love a person- that's when they become real”

— Jodi Picoult

“I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly.”

— Howard Barker

“I believe life is an education meant to teach us the need to be better people. And I believe this learning often takes place through trial and error which may mean being an awful person at times before clearly seeing and grasping the necessity to improve. If you don't agree with me, just ask Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge. I think Charles Dickens got it quite right.”

— Richelle E. Goodrich

“It seemed as if the whole of the world was slowly being stripped of innocence. Or maybe I was seeing a little too clearly.”

— Patti Smith

“News is important information that may influence your investments. Noise is talk or buzz or some headline that prevents you from seeing a story clearly. News is useful. Noise is a distraction. Calling what's noise and news after the fact is easy.”

— Maria Bartiromo

“He hung up and looked at Rhage.
"Hate this," the brother said.
"I know." Wrath moved the sticky, blood-soaked hair out of the vampire's face. "We're going to get you home."
"Didn't like seeing you shot."
Wrath smiled softly. "Clearly.”

— J.R. Ward

“There's something very special about seeing history so clearly in front of you through that architecture that you just don't get in the U.S. If I was asked to choose where I'd most like to live, I would always choose London.”

— Charlie Cox

“Mirages are things that aren't really there that you can see very clearly."
"How do you see something that isn't there?" ...
"sometimes it's much simpler than seeing things that are" ...”

— Norton Juster

“I came to think that nobody from England could draw American comic books, because they were clearly all done by this sort of Mafia, all these guys with Italian and Irish names who had the whole thing sewn up. It was actually seeing a comic book drawn by Barry Smith, who was about my age, and English.”

— Dave Gibbons

“When I was a child, I did always feel that people were hiding things, and that they weren't expressing their true feelings. When adults are too complicated, and cover their emotions with layers of well-intentioned subterfuge, the child isn't seeing reality clearly enough and gets upset.”

— Wallace Shawn

“After watching Taro reach the brink of bankruptcy, seeing their shares delisted from trading, hearing endless false promises about receiving audited financial statements, and witnessing an unchecked drain of company resources, the shareholders have clearly had enough.”

— Dilip Shanghvi

“Artists are visionaries. We routinely practice a form of faith, seeing clearly and moving toward a creative goal that shimmers in the distance - often visible to us, but invisible to those around us.”

— Julia Cameron

“All I could remember was her smile. Unable to picture the loved face, however strenuously I tried to make myself remember it, I was for ever irritated to find that my memory had retained exact replicas of the striking and futile faces of the roundabout man and the barley-sugar woman, just as the bereaved, who each night search their dreams in vain for the lost beloved, will find their sleep is peopled by all manner of exasperating and unbearable intruders, whom they have always found, even in the waking world, more than dislikable. Faced with the impossibility of seeing clearly the object of their grief, they come close to accusing themselves of not grieving, just as I was tempted to believe that my inability to remember the features of Gilberte's face meant that I had forgotten her and had stopped loving her.”

— Marcel Proust

“Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives.”

— Deirdre Blomfield Brown

“Seeing the world around you clearly is a critical step in developing an idea for a business, carrying out that idea, and then thriving with an ongoing concern. Through choice, predilection, lack of education, impatience, or other causes, the entrepreneur lives, in a way, outside the mainstream.”

— Paul Hawken

“When we awake it is the animal, the plant, that thinks in us. Primitive thought without the least disguise. We see a terrible universe, because we see clearly. A little later, intelligence introduces its impeding contrivances. It brings the little toys which man invents in order to hide the void. It is then that we think we are seeing clearly. We attribute our uneasiness to the miasmas of the brain as it passes from dream to reality.”

— Jean Cocteau

“Do you like him? Ty asked. "Not that I care." "I do," I said, because it was true. Even though it didn't matter anymore. "Not that I care you don't care. Though you clearly do care, and I don't care about that either." "Well, I don't care that you don't care that I don't care. In fact i'm glad. Because, um, if I were seeming someone that I liked, I'd want you to be happy for me.""Are you seeing someone?" I asked, pretty sure he wasn't. "Not that I care.”

— Sarah Rees Brennan

“He was just a loser with a credit card.
Maybe in the past I never realized that. Hell, maybe I'd been the kind of guy who thought money equaled class. Maybe I thought the air of arrogance Zach wore as armor made him superior to others.
And then I fell in love with a girl who was the epitome of the opposite of my world.
She shattered everything I thought I knew. And though she might be the one wearing glasses, it was me who was finally seeing clearly.”

— Cambria Hebert

“Pity! Ha, ha! I have never known
pity, since you deserted me. I was incapable of feeling it. If
a poor starved child came into my kitchen, shivering, and crying,
and begging for a morsel of food, I let the servants look to it.
I never felt any desire to take the child to myself, to warm it
at my own hearth, to have the pleasure of seeing it eat and be
satisfied. And yet I was not like that when I was young; that I
remember clearly! It is you that have created an empty, barren
desert within me
and without me too!”

— Henrik Ibsen

“So many human beings, none of them seeing clearly.”

— Anthony Doerr

“Once you clearly see the disturbed part, then ask, "Who is it that sees this? Who notices this inner disturbance?" Asking this is the solution to your every problem. The very fact that you can see the disturbance means that you are not it. The process of seeing something requires a subject-object relationship. The subject is called "The Witness" because it is the one who sees what's happening.”

— Michael A. Singer

“Love sees clearly, and seeing, loves on. But infatuation is blind; when it gains sight, it dies.”

— Mary Roberts Rinehart

“He's got lots of money and clearly has grandiose schemes, seeing himself as an important global player. There is a reality to it. Oil is at record prices, and he's willing to spend both in Venezuela and in the region. But the question is, how much influence is he gaining”

— Michael Shifter

“Photography begins not in the camera but in the
mind and the eye. The real work is one of noticing and appreciating, seeing things clearly and differently, and
sharing that vision with others. I have developed my
vision and my photographic craft in order to bring
the beauty of nature to light in a fresh way that
can inspire and nourish people.”

— Bill Atkinson

“Our emotions are not transformed by trying harder, but by seeing more clearly.”

— Mike Bickle

“Imagine how our lives might be if everyone had even a bit more of the Wisdom that comes from seeing clearly. Suppose people everywhere, simultaneously, stopped what they were doing and paid attention for only as long as it took to recognize their shared humanity. Surely the heartbreak of the world's pain, visible to all, would convert everyone to kindness. What a gift that would be.”

— Sylvia Boorstein

“An essential part of seeing clearly is finding the willingness to look closely and to go beyond our own ideas.”

— Cheri Huber

“Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly. To his contemporaries it appeared frivolous and contradictory to perform as both superman and socialist, sceptic and believer, legalist and heretic, high-brow and mob-orator. But feeling the duty to teach as well as to mirror mankind, Shaw did not accept himself as a contradictory being.”

— Jacques Barzun

“The rainbow mirrors human aims and action. Think, and more clearly wilt thou grasp it, seeing Life is but light in many-hued reflection.”

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“The sense of self is one of the obscurations that prevents us from seeing clearly, the idea that there is a self or that we are anyone in particular.”

— Frederick Lenz

“Charles Murray, however, clearly believes that being able to cure fatal diseases is more important than some other things and that Rembrandt was a greater artist than your local sidewalk cartoon sketcher. Most people might regard this as obvious common sense but some of the intelligentsia may be seething with resentment at seeing their pet fetishes ignored.”

— Thomas Sowell

“Sometimes, when I am tired of so many oscillations, I look for refuge in a word which I begin to love for itself. Resting in the heart of words, seeing clearly into the cell of a word, feeling that the word is the seed of a life, a growing dawn ... The poet Vandercammen says all that in a line: "A word can be a dawn and even a sure shelter."”

— Gaston Bachelard

“The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“When we feel joyful, euphoric, happy, we are more open to life, more capable of seeing things clearly and handling daily tensions.”

— Leo Buscaglia

“Meditation means removing all your prejudices, putting all your conclusions aside, seeing without any hindrance, seeing without any curtains, seeing clearly without any mediation of any thought, seeing without Buddha standing between you and reality, or Krishna, or Christ.”

— Rajneesh

“I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.”

— Clive James