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"My green thumb came only as a result
of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant's point of view."
- H. Fred Ale
"Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to
lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain."
- Henry David Thoreau
"One sees great things from the
valley, only small things from the peak."
- G. K. Chesterton
"Life just seems so full of
connections. Most of the time we don't even pay attention to the depth of life. We only
see flat surfaces."
- Colin Neenan
"To see what is in front of one's nose
needs a constant struggle."
- George Orwell
"The precision of naming takes away from the
uniqueness of seeing."
- Pierre Bonnard
"Love looks not with the eyes but with
the mind;
and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind."
- William Shakespeare
"No object is mysterious. The
mystery is your eye."
- Elizabeth Bowen
"The eyes are the gateway to the
soul."
- Herman Melville
"The microscope is man's noblest, supreme,
and most far-reaching tool."
- Adrianus Pijper
"People follow shapes and masses of color and
rarely look with the same attention at an object once it is set in our memory.
We 'see' by symbols."
- Raul Gonzalez
"The eyes are the window of the soul."
- English Proverb
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as
we are."
- Anais Nin
"I shut my eyes in order to see."
- Paul Gauguin
"Your vision will
become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside,
dreams; who looks inside, awakens."
- Carl Jung
"Finally, I realized what makes my
garden exciting is me. Living in it every day, participating minutely in each small event, I see with doubled and redoubled vision.
Where friends notice a solitary hummingbird pricking the salvia flowers, I recall a season's worth of hummingbird battles."
- Janice Emily Bowers, A Full Life in a Small Place,
1993
"The art of being wise is the art of
knowing what to overlook."
- William James
"Don't overlook the obvious."
- Verna Reid
"The soul that can speak with its eyes
can also kiss with a gaze."
- Author Unknown
"The human doesn't see things as they
are, but as he is."
- Racter
"I go to nature to be soothed and
healed, and to have my senses put in order."
- John Burroughs
"True confidence comes from realizing the
view."
- Tulku
Urgyen
"We do not see everything in the environment in
the complete, totally resolved, explicit character of the photograph. We, in
fact, prioritize our seeing."
- Burton Silverman
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Months and Seasons |
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"Never lose an
opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting -- a wayside sacrament.
Welcome it in every fair face, in every
fair sky, in every flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing."
- Ralph Waldo
Emerson
"Art
does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see."
- Paul Klee
"Had the price of looking been blindness, I
would have looked."
- Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal
"If you go as far as you can see, you will then see enough to go even farther."
- John Wooden
"Equipped with our five senses - along with telescopes and microscopes and mass
spectrometers and seismographs and magnetometers and particle accelerators and
detectors sensitive to the entire electromagnetic spectrum - we explore the
universe around us and call the adventure science."
- Edwin Hubble
"Look! Nature is
overflowing with the grandeur of God!"
- John Muir
"The soul never thinks without a
mental picture."
- Aristotle
"Look hard at what pleases you and harder at what doesn't."
- Colette
"What is seen by the eye is transformed and
colored by the vision of the mind."
- Robert Wade
"The artist alone sees spirits.
But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"I know I'm not seeing things as they
are, I'm seeing things as I am."
- Laurel Lee
"All of us are watchers
– of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway –
but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing."
- Peter M. Leschak
"One eye sees, the other feels."
- Paul Klee
"Your mind is your best camera . . .
Go out and take some beautiful pictures."
- Daryl Ryman
January: Quotes, Poems, Sayings
"If you desire to see, learn how to
act."
- Heinz von Foerster,
Observing Systems
"The eyes envy the mind."
- Chuang Tzu
"Seeing is a gift that comes with practice."
- Stephanie Mills
"We eat light, drink it in
through our skins. With a little more exposure to light, you feel part of things
physically. I like feeling the power of light and space physically because then
you can order it materially. Seeing is a very sensuous act--there's a sweet
deliciousness to feeling yourself see something."
- James Turrell
"Subject is known by what she
sees."
- Allen Ginsberg,
Mind Writing Slogans
"Ears hear and eyes see.
What then does mind do?"
- A Zen Question
"Love is the state in which man sees things
Most widely different from what they are."
- Nietzsche
"As for garden photographers, how differently they see things.
With what ease the camera seems to compose a picture of great beauty with its discriminating lens. The
naked eye can't censor some ugly sight on the periphery of vision; the photographer takes the perfect shot and picks for us just what we need to see."
- Mirabel Osler
See the planes of light as shapes, the planes of
shadows as shapes. Squint your eyes and find the big, fluent shapes.
- Irwin Greenberg
I really believe that there are things
that nobody would see,
if I didn't photograph them.
- Kingsley Amis,
Lucky Jim
We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and
especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are
observing.
- G. C. Lichtenberg
We are a landscape of all we have seen.
- Isamu Noguchi
One sees more with one's fingers than
with one's glasses.
Man sihet jtzund mer durch die finger denn durch die brillen
The whole of life lies in the verb seeing.
- Teilhard De Chardin
Nature comes home to one most when he
is at home; the stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also. One's own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of himself; he has sowed himself broadcast upon it, and it reflects his own moods and feelings; he is sensitive to the verge of the horizon: cut those trees, and he bleeds; mar those hills, and he suffers. How has the farmer planted himself in his fields; builded himself into his stone walls, and evoked the sympathy of the hills by his struggle! This home feeling, this domestication of nature, is important to the observer. This is the birdlime with which he catches the bird; this is the private door that admits him behind the scenes."
- John Burroughs, 1837 - 1921
Our visions begin with our desires.
- Audre Lorde
February: Quotes, Poems, Sayings
Perfect moments come in every garden,
though more frequently in some than others.
To the very active gardener they may not be of great importance and usually they
will be happy accidents, lucky moments when, chancing to glance up, the gardener
will see that this or that grouping of plants at the height of their flowering looks
exactly right, because of the way the light falls on them.
- Susan Hill and Rory Stuart, Reflections from a Garden,
1995
To see is one of God's great gifts to
man and to comprehend what we see is doubly so. Furthermore, He has endowed some
people with the qualities to see the beauties of life and nature much more than others and they have the greatest gift of all.
- Waite Phillips,
Epigrams
“Where
the telescope ends the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander
view?”
- Victor Hugo
It is easy to suppose that few people
realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there - few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings.
- Wallace Stevens,
The Necessary
Angel
Learn to see, and then you'll know
that there is no end to the new worlds of our vision.
- Carlos Castaneda
The eyes believe themselves; the ears believe other people.
- German Proverb
Don't try to describe the ocean if you've never
seen it.
- Jimmy Buffett
The eyes have one language
everywhere.
George Herbert
Seeing
is believing.
- Manfred Von Heimendahl
Look into the mirror. The face that
pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret:
You are looking into a predator's eyes.
- Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, 1990
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for
adjusting the focus
to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and
for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree.
- Charles Darwin,
The Origin of the Species,
By the
help of microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence
there is a new visible world discovered to the understanding.
- Robert Hooke
Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the
clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever
has polished it more sees more - more unseen forms become manifest to him.
- Rumi
Contemplating an object fixedly with
the mind, asking myself, 'What is it?' without thinking of any other object or relating it to anything else for hours on
end.
- Simone Weil
Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for
seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Rhodora
You can observe a lot by just
watching.
- Yogi Berra
Faith
is a fine invention
For gentlemen to see;
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.
- Emily Dickinson
Take the whole universe all at once
and put it on your eyelashes...
- Yun-men, 900 AD
The eye of understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or levels, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.
- Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, 1627
Gertrude Jekyll, like Monet, was a
painter with poor eyesight, and their gardens - his at
Giverny in the Seine valley, hers in Surrey - had resemblance's that may have sprung from
this condition. Both loved plants that foamed and frothed over walls and pergolas,
spread in
tides beneath trees; both saw flowers in islands of colored light - an image the normal
eye
captures only by squinting.
- Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts, 1981
"What
is this life if, full of care, we
have no time to stand and stare."
- William Henry Davies, 1911
Everything you see is a reflection of itself. You
move around and you are a reflection of what is next to you.
- Grace Paleg
I was not looking now at an unusual
flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
- Aldous Huxley
The eye encompasses the beauty of the whole
world.
- Leonardo da Vinci
We never see anything completely. We never
see a tree, we see the tree through the image that we have of it, the concept of
that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different
from the actual tree.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
On the face of it, the easiest of all activities
should be seeing what we see. In reality, it's the hardest.
- Charles Movalli
Ineluctable modality
of the visible; at least that if no more,
thought through my eyes.
Signatures of all things I am here to read.
- James Joyce
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
- Charles A. Beard
Observe things as they are and don't
pay attention to other people.
- Huang Po
One looks, looks long, and the world comes in.
- Joseph Campbell
We do not err because truth is
difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.
- Alexander Solzhenitzyn
My eyes make pictures when they are
shut.
- Samuel T. Coleridge,
A Day-Dream
My whole body is covered with eyes:
Behold it!
Be without fear!
I see all around.
- Eskimo poem
This webpage has been moved to a new URL. This webpage is now being maintained, updated, and expanded at the following new location: http://www.egreenway.com/reason/vision.htm.
Connection with gardens, even small
ones, even potted plants, can become windows to the inner life. The simple act of stopping and looking at the beauty around us can be prayer.
- Patricia R. Barrett, The Sacred Garden, 2001
An eager face staring into the Rich silence
Of mirrored space devoid of mind;
Not projecting or connecting, but reflecting
Supreme non-fictions, Things
Naked as they are, as they are.
- Mike Garofalo,
Above the Fog
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing
upon the shoulders of giants.
- Isaac Newton
There is nothing more difficult for a truly
creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.
- Henri Matisse
Why let what you see get in the way?
- Joyce Kellock
Without the eye, the head is blind. Without the
head, the eye is adrift.
- Darby Bannard
It takes a little
talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose,
a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.
- W. H. Auden
We found Matisse living in a small house, with a magnificent,
sweeping view beyond his vegetable garden. In one room there was a cage with a lot of fluttering birds. The
place was covered with paintings, most of them obviously new ones. I marveled at his production
and I asked him, "What is your inspiration?" "I grow artichokes,"
he said. His eyes smiled at my surprise and he went on to explain: "Every morning I go into the garden and
watch these plants. I see the play of light and shade on the leaves and I discover new combinations of
colors and fantastic patterns. I study them. They inspire me. Then I go back to the studio and
paint.
- Andre Kostelanetz, This I Believe, 1952
"What is the color of your
head from the standpoint of your eyes? You feel that you head is black, or that
it has not any color at all. Outside you see your field of vision as an oval
because your two eyes act as two centers of an ellipse. But what is beyond the
field of vision? What color is it where you can't see? It is not black, and
this is an important point; there is no color at all beyond your field of
vision. This little mental exercise gives us an idea of what is mean by the
character hsüan. Although its dictionary definition is "dark, deep,
obscure," it actually refers to this kind of no color that is the color of your
head - as far as your eyes are concerned. Perhaps we could say that the
invisibility of one's head, in a certain sense the lack of a head, is the secret
of being alive. To be headless, or have no head in just the same sense I am
talking about, is our way of talking about the Chinese expression wu hsin,
or "no mind." As a matter of fact, if you want to see the inside of your head
all you have to do is keep your eyes open, because all that you are experiencing
in the external, visual field is a state of your brain."
- Alan Watts, Swimming Headless, 1966
The hardest thing to explain
is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.
- Ayn Rand
Art is not what you see, but what you make others
see.
- Edgar Degas
What
has happened
makes
the world.
Live
on the edge,
looking.
- Robert Creeley, Here
Sight is where the eye hits.
- Louis Zukofsky
If you can train your senses to
perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock, what is to stop you for training them to 'slow down' when you look at a tree or a puddle?
- Colin Wilson,
Poetry and Mysticism
If you gaze for long, the abyss also
gazes into you.
- Nietzsche
For me, a landscape does not exist in
its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.
- Claude Monet
I am a part of all that I have seen.
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
A weak
mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive
great ones.
- Lord Chesterfield
The
eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it
really is.
- Kahlil Gibran
One's
destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
- Henry
Miller
If the doors of perception were
cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
- William Blake
The greatest thing a human soul ever does
in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.
Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can
see.
To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion - all in one.
- John Ruskin, Modern Painters
Or, to express this in another way,
suggested to me by Professor Suzuki, in connection with "seeing into our own nature," poetry is the something that we see, but the
seeing and the something are one; without the seeing there
is no something, no something, no seeing. There is neither
discovery nor creation: only the perfect, indivisible experience.
-
R. H. Blyth,
Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, p.84
Same old eyes, same old world but the difference
is how you look at what is in front of you, not what it is.
- Lister Sinclair
In "seeing" a landscape,
one both "chooses" what to see and passively allows nature to act upon one's eyes and subconscious mind. Because of this continuous oscillation between will and passivity, one can never truly comprehend what scientists and painters alike have called the "champ de vision," or "field of vision." In the
end, houses are perceived as houses, trees as trees, and roads as roads, and they are not simply colored light acting upon the retina. Certain forms contain powerful meanings and associations for individual viewers, others are blander, and each participates (unequally) in a larger abstraction called "the landscape."
- A Day in the County: Impressionism and the French
Landscape, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
In a dark time the eye begins to see.
- Theodore Roethke
Probably the most potent desire for a painter, an
image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to
realize it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible.
- Philip Guston
The common eye sees only the outside of things,
and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and
the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise,
and which the other kind couldn't detect.
- Mark Twain
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would
have looked.
- Ralph Ellison
The true mystery of the world is
the visible, not the invisible.
- Oscar Wilde
The more sand that has escaped from
the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
- Jean Paul Sartre
My work isn't about form. It's about seeing. I'm
excited about seeing things, and I'm interested in the way I think other people
see things.
- Roy Lichtenstein
Your vision will become clear only
when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
- Carl Jung
The principal person
in a picture is light.
- Manet
At one point consciousness-altering devices
like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in
later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.
- Timothy Leary
Nothing exists until
or unless it is observed.
An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative
observation." Creative viewing.
- William S. Burroughs
Gardeners work with an ever-receding
ideal of perfection; no sooner is something growing well than they see how to place it better or give it a better neighbor. To other's eyes, all may look as well as could be expected, but a good gardener's eye sees more to be improved.
- Robin Lane Fox
The obscure we see eventually.
The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.
- Edward R. Murrow
Why do "overlook" and "oversee" mean opposite
things?
- George Carlin
Look at the soil, feel the soil, smell the soil: The Beginning!
Wise is the person who sees the cherry trees in bloom and does not say "life is
not a bowl of cherries."
Looking at
your garden involves far more than your eyes.
Once we stop looking we often see It right
away.
What I make of my garden depends upon how close I stand to it.
Gardening tempts you to look, again and
again, until the novel is seen.
If you keep looking for one thing, you will find many.
A poverty of vision is not the
only limitation.
Sensations flow with the seasons.
Seeing with one eye and
feeling with the other does help bring things into focus.
Gardening boils down to doing and seeing for yourself.
- Mike
Garofalo,
Pulling Onions
Each band or level, being a
particular manifestation of the electromagnetic spectrum, is what it is only by virtue of the other bands. The color blue is no less beautiful because it exits along side the other colors of a rainbow, and "blueness" itself depends upon the existence of the other colors, for if
there were no color but blue, we would never be able to see it.
- Ken Wilbur, The Spectrum of Consciousness, 1977, p. 6
A powerful hand lens [Eschenback
Leutchlupe] with a focused beam of light opens up
an entire world below the threshold of the ordinary experience of seeing.
- Allen Lacy, The Gardener's Eye, 1992, p. 23
"Crouchers move through a garden at a
stoop: naming, gasping, horraying, admiring or coveting plants; Gapers saunter, smiling or sighing at what they find, succumbing to an intangible beatitude that takes them for a brief escape into another
dimension. Both sorts of gardener are besotted; both get their hands dirty; think
and talk gardening; but on the threshold of another's garden, each use a different set of whiskers.
- Mirabel Osler, Gapers and Crouchers
"Humanity has passed through a long
history of one-sidedness
and of a social condition that has always contained the potential
of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology.
The great project of our time must be to open the other eye:
to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the
cleavage between humanity and nature
that came with early wisdom."
- Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom
"The
gifts of microscopes to our understanding of cells and organisms is so profound
that one has to ask: What are the gifts of the microscopist? Here is
my opinion. The gift of the great microscopist is the ability to "Think
with the eyes and see with the brain." Deep revelations into the nature of
living things continue to travel on beams of light."
- Daniel Mazia
There will always be those who must look into the
dark in order to see.
- Alan McGlashan
A beautiful blossom is a fleeting thing
It stays for a moment and then takes wing:
With special rays we catch it ere flight
So all may enjoy the beautiful sight.
- Albert Richards,
Floral Radiographs: The Secret
Garden
The question is not what you look at,
but what you see.
- Thoreau
I begin to see an object when I cease to
understand it.
- Thoreau
[The Prajnaparmita, Mother of the
Bodisattvas, Mother of the Buddhas ...]
She is a source of light, and from everyone
in the triple world.
She removes darkness ... She brings light to the blind,
She
brings light, so that all fear and distress may be forsaken.
She has gained the Five
Eyes,
and She shows the path to all beings. She Herself is an organ of vision.
- Perfection of Wisdom Sutra, Mahayana Buddhist scripture, circa 100
A.D.
These beautiful days ... do not exist
as mere pictures - maps hung upon the walls of memory to brighten at times when touched by association or will ... They saturate themselves into every part of the body and live always.
- John Muir
Vision gives you the impulse to make the
picture your own.
- Robert Collier
The eyes that see God are the same eyes through which God
sees me.
- Meister Eckhart
"Why
has not Man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly.
Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n,
T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n."
- Alexander Pope
"One eye looks within, the other eye looks
without."
- Henri Cartier-Bresson
"Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing."
- Bill Cosby
Fieldes have eies and woods have
eares.
- John Heywood, 1565
Again and again I’ve taken quick glances and
then for some reason I’ve got to sit
before a picture waiting and it’s opened up like one of those Japanese flowers
that
you put into water and something I thought wasn’t worth more than a casual,
respectful glance begins to open up depth after depth of meaning.”
- Sister Wendy Beckett
August:
Quotes, Poems, Sayings
I paint objects as I
think them; not as I see them.
- Pablo Picasso
Close your eyes and you will see.
- Joseph Joubert
Vision: the art of seeing the
invisible.
- Jonathan Swift
The foolish reject what they see, not
what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see.
- Huang Po
We eat light, drink it
through our skins. With a little
more exposure to light, you feel part of things physically.
I like feeling the power of light and space physically
because then you can order it materially. Seeing is a
very sensuous act - there's a sweet deliciousness to
feeling yourself see something.
- James Turrell
Once you really commence to see things, then you
really commence to feel things.
- Edward Steichen
When you look at a peony, you first see the
whole flower, its color and shape.
As you keep looking, you see the petals and veins and stamens and
pistils. When you look more closely still, you see the segments and shading in the
petals, until you begin to feel the vastness of those details. To see the
vastness
by looking at one thing in its details is to see its sacred connection to space
and to all other things. ... When you see an object illuminated by
space, when you see with your heart, the object actually communicates back to you. When
you cherish something, it glows. It tells you where it belongs and how you
should present it, because you see it so clearly. Then you follow its magical
instructions, you create a work of art."
- Jeremy Haywood, A Guide to the Sacred
World of Shamabhala Warriorship, p. 130
Artistic vision is
haveing the clarity to fall in love
with what you see.
- Chogyam Trungpa, the Dorje Dradul
It is only with the heart that one
can see rightly.
What is essential is invisible to the eye.
- Antoine de Saint Exupery
Is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told
me that it teems with quiet fun.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gardener's , like everyone else, live
second by second and minute by minute. What we see
at one particular moment is then and there before us. But there is a second way of
seeing.
Seeing with the eye of memory, not the eye of our anatomy,
calls up days and seasons past and years gone by.
- Allen Lacy, The Gardener's Eye, 1992, p. 16
The
scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it
because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is
beautiful.
- Henri Poicare
Gardening is the art that uses
flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas - working with nature provides the technique.
- Elizabeth Murray
Seeing, in the finest and broadest sense, means
using your senses, your intellect, and your emotions. It means encountering your
subject matter with your whole being. It means looking beyond the labels of
things and discovering the remarkable world around you.
- Freeman Patterson
As long as there is a hunger for knowledge and a deep desire to uncover the
truth, microscopy will continue to unveil Mother Nature’s deepest and most
beautiful secrets.
- Lelio Orci
But under the beaming, constant and almost
vertical sun of Virginia, shade is our Elysium.
In the absence of this no beauty of the eye can be enjoyed.
- Thomas Jefferson
We do a lot of looking: we look through lenses,
telescopes, television tubes... Our looking is perfected every day, but we
see less and less.
- Frederick Franck
Thus we cannot escape the fact that
the world we know is constructed in order to see itself. This is indeed amazing. Not so much in view of what it
sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.
But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into a least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen.
- G. Spencer Brown,
Laws of Form
Nature composes some of her loveliest music for the microscope and telescope.
- Theodore Roszak
Discovery consists of looking at the
same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.
- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology
and Medicine
Good and evil are typified by light
and darkness; therefore, if we bring light into a dark room, the darkness disappears, and inasmuch as a soul is filled with good, evil disappears.
- Aurelia Mace, Shaker eldress
Yet mystery and
imagination arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness ...
Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding.
- Lao Tzu
Organismic awareness is what we - on the Ego
Level - ordinarily, but clumsily, refer to as seeing, touching, tasting, smelling and hearing. But in its very purest
form, this "sensual awareness" is non-symbolic, non-conceptual, momentary
consciousness. Organismic awareness is awareness of the Present only - you can't taste the
past, smell the past, see the past, touch the past, or hear the past. Neither can you
taste, smell, see, touch or hear the future. In other words, organismic consciousness
is properly timeless, and being timeless, it is essentially spaceless. Just as
organismic awareness knows no past or future, it knows no inside or outside, no self or
other. Thus pure organismic consciousness participates fully in the non-dual awareness called Absolute Subjectivity.
- Ken Wilber, Spectrum of Consciousness, 1977, p. 115
Names are an important key to what a
society values. Anthropologists recognize naming as
'one of the chief methods for imposing order on perception.' What is not named
in a culture
very likely goes unnoticed by the majority of its people. The converse is also
true:
people pay greater attention to things that been given names.
- David S. Slawson, Secret Teachings in the Art of
Japanese Gardens, 1987
Giving names to things is a way of knowing
them and of seeing them as well. Knowledge deals importantly in names, and naming requires the sort of vision that discerns that these two objects are of the same kind and those other two are not.
- Allen Lacey, The Gardener's Eye, 1992, p. 42
But we have been taught to see before
our eyes have found out a way of seeing for themselves.
-
Arthur
Symons Quotations
The mind stands in the way of the eye.
- Arthur Stern
Nobody sees a flower - really - it is
so small it takes time - we haven't time -
and to see takes time, like having a friend takes time.
- Georgia O'Keeffe
It takes time and devotion to learn the
language of color and lighting in the garden. Your tastes are sure to change over time, reflecting your inner evolution.
Seeing the garden as a canvas for your celebration of Nature's palette is a wonderful
expression of the soul's love of beauty and artistry. Your own inner intuition, however,
is often your best teacher, but don't forget that Mother Nature will always have a few
surprises up Her sleeve as well. Perhaps your greatest insight will be that this glorious
exploration of light and color and their interrelationship is really meant to illuminate the many
facets of your being and personality.
- Christopher and Tricia McDowell, The Sanctuary Garden, 1998
Love is not blind - it sees more, not
less.
But because it sees more, it is willing to see less
- Rabbi Julius Gordon
I do not paint what I see, but what I saw.
- Edward Munch
The secret of seeing things as they
are is to take off our colored
spectacles. That being-as-it-is, with nothing extraordinary about
it, nothing wonderful, is the great wonder. The ability to see
things normally is no small thing; to be really normal is the
unusual. In that normality begins to bubble up inspiration.
- Zen Master Sessan
The flower that follows the sun does
so even on cloudy days.
- Robert Leighton (1611-1684)
The eye alterning,
alters all.
- William Blake
There's a saying among prospectors:
"Go out looking for one thing, and that's all you'll ever find.
- Robert Flaherty
Every fight is one between
different angles of vision illuminating the same truth.
- Mahatma Ghandi
"Seeing within changes
one's outer vision."
- Joesph Chilton Pearce
"To gaze is to think."
- Salvadore Dali
Light, Sunshine, Shadows: Quotes, Poems, Sayings, Facts
"Of course the Dharma-body of the
Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I - or rather the blessed Not-I - cared to look at."
- Aldous Huxley
When your eyes are functioning well you don't
see your eyes. If your eyes are imperfect you see spots in front of them. That means there are some lesions in the
retina or wherever, and because your eyes aren't working properly, you feel them. In the same way,
you don't hear your ears. If you have a ringing in your ears it means there's something
wrong with your ears. Therefore, if you do feel yourself, there must be something wrong with
you. Whatever you have, the sensation of I is like spots in front of
your eyes - it means something's wrong with your functioning.
- Alan Watts, Ego - from the Essential Alan Watts
The sky is not less blue because a blind man
does not see it.
- Danish proverb
To see is to forget the name of the thing one
sees.
- Paul Valery
Men are born with two eyes, but only
one tongue, in order that they should see twice as much as they say.
- Charles Caleb Colton
The contented person enjoys the
scenery of a detour.
– Author Unknown
Now is the time of the illuminated
woods ... when every leaf glows like a tiny lamp.
- J. Burroughs
We are living in a world that is
absolutely transparent and God is shining through
it all the time. God manifests Himself everywhere, in everything - in people and
in things and in nature and in events ... The only thing is we don't see
it ...
I have no program for this seeing. It is only given.
But the gate of heaven is everywhere.
- Thomas Merton
The idea of linking color and behavior is
reasonable enough. Anyone who has ever felt blue, seen red,
blacked out, or turned green knows we're prone to make emotional associations with
different shades.
- Winifred Gallagher, The Power of Place, 1993,
p. 50
If you look at a thing 999 times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it for the 1000th time, you are in danger of
seeing it for the first time.
- G. K. Chesterton
The longer you garden the better the eye
gets, the more tuned to how colors vibrate in different ways and what they can do to each other. You become a scientist as well as an artist, with the lines between increasingly blurred.
- Marjorie Harris, In the Garden, 1995
To speak truly, few adult persons can
see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If your vision doesn't scare you,
then both your vision and your God are too small.
- Brother Andrew
The true seeing is when there is no
seeing.
- Shen Hui, Chinese Zen Master
The eyes are not responsible when the
mind does the seeing.
- Publilius Syrus
Look. This is your world!
You can't not look. There is no other world. This is your world; it is your feast. You inherited this; you inherited these eyeballs; you inherited this world of color. Look at the greatness of the whole
thing. Look! Don't hesitate - look! Open your eyes. Don't blink, and look, look - look further.
- Chogyan Trungpa
Seeing is different than being
told.
- Proverb from Kenya
We all live under the same sky, but
we don't all have the same horizon.
- Konrad Adenauer
Close your bodily eye, that you may see your
picture first with the eye of the spirit. Then bring to light what you have seen
in the darkness, that its effect may work back, from without to within.
- Caspar David Friedrich
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
- Albert Einstein
Don't think of words when you stop but to see the picture better.
- Jack Kerouac
Inside yourself or outside, you never have
to change what you see, only the way you see it.
- Thaddeus Golas
You cannot depend on your eyes when
your imagination is out of focus.
- Mark Twain
Seeing within changes one's
outer vision.
- Joseph Chilton Pearce
Nature composes some of her lovliest
poems for the microscope and the telescope.
- Theodore Roszak
We look at many things and never see; art is
seeing and feeling.
- Dee Knott
No great artist ever sees things as they really
are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
- Oscar Wilde
It is the familiar that usually
eludes us in life.
What is before our nose is what we see last.
- William Barrett
"Art first of all is optical.
That's where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think."
- Paul Cezanne
"Information is light. Information
in itself, about anything, is light."
- Tom Stoppard
"Science is spectral analysis.
Art is light synthesis."
- Karl Kraus
"My spirit has ways of seeing that my eyes cannot
comprehend."
- Philippe Benichou
I learn from everything I look at, good, bad or
indifferent. I follow my eye reflexively; if it is drawn toward something, I pay
attention and try to find out why. You train your eye, build up a mental image
bank, and constantly try to pinpoint why some things are convincing and others
aren't.
- Roberta Smith
Vision without action is a
daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
- Japanese saying
Not "Revelation" -- 'tis --
that waits,
But our unfurnished eyes--
- Emily Dickinson
If we study Japanese
art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent,
who spends his time doing what? He studies a single blade of grass.”
- Vincent Van Gogh
Seeing is such a privilege. Who notices the way
the screech of a gull looks, the look of a gale, the sight of some fragrance?
- Keith Crown
Some things have to be believed to be
seen.
- Ralph Hodgson
Zen is like looking for the
spectacles that are sitting on your nose.
- Zen aphorism
An artist sees things not as they are, but as he
is.
- Robert Beverly Hale
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
- William Blake
Things are because we see them, and
what we see, and how we see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.
-
Oscar Wilde
Everyone takes the limits of his own
vision for the limits of the world.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
The thing known and the thing seen are not the
same.
- Harriet Shorr
... This
is the paradox of vision:
Sharp perception softens
our existence in the world.
- Susan Griffin,
Happiness
He who can no longer pause to wonder
and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead;
his eyes are closed.
- Albert Einstein
It is the commonest of mistakes to consider that the
limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.
- C. W. Leadbeater
Sometimes the heart sees what is
invisible to the eye.
- H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Open your eye that you may see
The beauty that around you lies,
The misty loveliness of the dawn,
The glowing colors of the skies;
The Child's bright eager eyes of blue,
The gnarled and wrinkled face of age,
The bird with crimson on his wing
Whose spirit never knew a cage;
The roadsides blooming goldenrod
So brave through summer's wind and heat,
The brook that rushes to the sea
With courage that naught may defeat.
Open your eyes that you may see
The wonder that around you lies;
It will enrich your every day
And make you glad and kind and wise.
- Emma Boge Whisenand, Open Your Eyes
It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy. ... One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech;
it is the bodily symbol of identity.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we see depends
mainly on what we look for.
- John Lubbock
Love does not consist in gazing at
each other,
but in looking together in the same direction.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Through the ample open door of the
peaceful country barn,
A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding;
And haze, and vista, and the far horizon, fading away.
- Walt Whitman
Paint what you see, not what you know.
- Charles Hawthorne
If we see an object as a "bowl," it may inhibit
seeing it as "craft," just as seeing it as "craft" might inhibit seeing it as
"art." See first; name later.
- Darby Bannard
What is art but a way
of seeing.
- Thomas Berger
One who returns to a place sees it with new eyes.
Although the place may not have changed, the viewer inevitably has. For the
first time things invisible before become suddenly visible.
- Louis L'Amour
Open your eyes, look within.
Are you satisfied with the life you're livin'?
- Bob Marley
watching I watch myself
what I see is my creation
as though entering through my eyes
perception is
conception
into an eye more crystal clear
water of thoughts
what I watch watches me
I am the creation of what I see
- Octavio Paz, Blanco, 1966
Vipassana:
looking into something with clarity and precision,
seeing each component as distinct,
piercing all the way through so as to perceive
the most fundamental reality of that thing.
- Henepola Gunaratana
Mere colour, unspoiled
by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.
- Oscar Wilde
He who experiences the unity of life
sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye.
- Bhagavad Gita
The only sense we still respect is
eyesight, probably because it is so
closely attached to the brain. Go into any American house at random, you
will find something -- a plastic flower, false tiles, some imitation
something -- something which can be appreciated as material only if
apprehended by eyesight alone. Don't we go sightseeing in cars, thinking
we can experience a landscape by looking at it through glass?
- Galway Kinnell, Poetry, Personality and Death
See deeply the beauty and
interconnectedness of all life; then think, speak and act from what you see.
- Maggie Streincrohn Davis,
Caring in Remembered Ways
It's better not to see than to see wrongly.
- Robert M. Pirsig
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
An appetite; a feeling and a love
that had no need of a remoter charm
by thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.
- Wordsworth
There is more to us than we know. If we can
be made to see it, perhaps for the rest of our lives we will be unwilling to settle for less.
- Kurt Hahn
It takes time to really see. Seeing is in itself
an art. Perhaps that is what art is, the crystalization of a vision.
- Mary Jean Mailloux
A fool sees not the
same tree that a wise man sees.
- William Blake
The
beauty that addresses itself
to the eyes is only the spell
of the moment; the eye of the body
is not always that of the soul.
- George
Sand
"The eye sees only what
the mind is prepared to comprehend."
- Henri Louis Bergson
"At first, it appears that nothing could be easier than seeing. We just point our eyes where we want to go, and gather in whatever there is to see. Nothing could be less in need of explanation. The world is flooded with light, and everything is available to be seen. We can see people, pictures, landscapes, and whatever else we need to see, and with the help of science we can see galaxies, viruses, and the insides of our own bodies. Seeing does not interfere with the world or take anything from it, and it does not hurt or damage anything. Seeing is detached and efficient and rational. Unlike the stomach or the heart, eyes are our own to command: they obey every desire and thought. Each one of those ideas is completely wrong. The truth is more difficult: seeing is irrational, inconsistent, and undependable. It is immensely troubled, cousin to blindness and sexuality, and caught up in the threads of the unconscious. Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they will and then tell us they have only been where we have sent them. No matter how hard we look, we see very little of what we look at. If we imagine the eyes as navigational devices, we do so in order not to come to terms with what seeing really is. Seeing is like hunting and like dreaming, and even like falling in love. It is entangled in passions--jealousy, violence, possessiveness; and it is soaked in an affect--in pleasure and displeasure, and in pain. Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. Seeing is metamorphosis not mechanism."
"A vision is not just a picture of what could
be;
it is an appeal to our better selves,
a call to become something more."
- Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Direct your eye right inward, and
you'll find a thousand regions in your mind yet undiscovered. Travel them
and be expert in home-cosmography.
- Henry David Thoreau,
Walden
Content is a glimpse.
- Willem de Kooning
I could paint these mountains the way they look,
but it isn't how I see them.
- Justin Beckett
When a good poet looks at an object with the eyes
in his head, he sees more than merely accurately.
- John Andrew Holmes
When you see a palm tree, the palm
tree has seen you.
- African, Wolof, Proverb
Gardening isn't a hobby anymore.
It is a lifestyle, a paradigm shift. It is no longer about landscaped color or upgrades in the landscape. Gardening is about seeing. Gardening is about awareness.
- Terry Hershey, Soul Gardening, p. 85
Though we travel the world over to
find beauty, we must carry it with us or we find it not . . . The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in beholders.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it
because the closer I get the more differently I see.
- Alberto Giacometh
As I grow older, I pay less attention
to what people say. I just watch what they do.
- Andrew Carnegie
Keep this point clear:
central to discovering an experience's
perceptual meaning is a recognition of its identity
and its individuality.
- Edmund Blair Bolles
Gardening can bring out the inner child,
and sometimes, especially after all that time out in the hot sun,
it can bring out the inner surrealist. When the urge comes over you to construct a
zucchini zeppelin
or a tomato truck, give in to your muse and then document [photograph] your masterpiece,
preferably against an uncluttered background."
- Bart Barlow
We do not see with our eyes, but through them.
- Ken Danby
The only limits are, as always, those of
vision.
- James Broughton
Fundamentally, art is a way of seeing rather than
of doing or making.
- Alan Jarvis
Others can measure their visions by
what we see.
- Allen Ginsberg,
Mind Writing Slogans
Many eyes go through the meadow,
but few see the flowers in it.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hardly any one is able to see what is
before him, just as it is in itself. He comes expecting one thing, he finds another thing, he sees through the veil of his preconception, he
criticizes before he has apprehended, he condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself.
-
Arthur
Symons Quotations
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in
humble places where other people see nothing.
- Camille Pissarro
Where there is great love there are always miracles. Miracles rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming to us from
far off, but on our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
- Willa Cather
When there's nothing to see, look.
- Dakota Indian saying
We have five senses in which we glory and
which we recognize and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there are other senses - secret senses, sixth senses, if you will - equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded ... unconscious, automatic.
- Oliver Sacks
He thinks he believes
only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
- George Santayana
It skims in through the eye, and by means of the
utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation.
Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe
the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to
gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from
matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.
- John Updike
Our normal expectations about reality
are created by a social consensus. We are taught how to see and understand the world. The trick of socialization is to convince us that the descriptions we agree upon define the limits of the real world. What we call reality is only one way of seeing the world, a way that is supported by social consensus.
- Carlos Castaneda
Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great
vision.
- Henry Kissinger
Every scene, even the commonest, is
wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time; in its right, authentic
colors; without making comparisons. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no
remembrance of the past.
- Arnold Bennett
It is only necessary to behold the
least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance ... To perceive freshly, with fresh senses is to be inspired.
- Henry David Thoreau,
Walden
The gross elements are earth, water,
air and fire, with the fifth being space. Each particle of the body is made up of these five elements, which are manifested in different colors. In their true quality, space is blue light, water is white, earth is yellow, fire is red, and air is green.
- Tulku Thondup,
Boundless Healing
November: Quotes, Poems, Sayings
Don't think: Look!
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Everything you see I
owe to spaghetti.
- Sophia Loren
The eye of the master will do more
work than both his hands.
- Benjamin Franklin
What a life, seeing!
- John Marin
Who sees with equal eye, as God of
all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
- Alexander Pope, 1688-1744,
Essay on Man
The heart has eyes which
the brain knows nothing of.
- Charles H. Perkhurst
I do not wish to die -
There is such contingent
beauty in life:
The open window on summer
mornings
Looking out on
gardens and green things growing,
The shadowy cups of rose
flowering to themselves-
Images of time and
eternity-
Silence in the garden and
felt along the walls.
The room is suddenly
filled with sun,
Like a sacrament
one can never be
Sufficiently thankful
for. Door ajar,
The eye reaches across
from one
Open window to another,
eye to eye,
And then the healing
spaces of the sky ......
- Alfred Leslie Rowse, 1903-
We are all in the gutter,
but some of us are looking at the stars.
- Oscar Wilde
Jesus said, "Recognize what is
in your sight, and that which is hidden from you will become plain to you. For there is nothing hidden that shall not become manifest."
-
Gospel of
Didymas Judas Thomas
Go see it and see for yourself why you shouldn't
go see it.
- Samuel Goldwyn
If your garden was there before you were, chances are it grew out of many other's dreams.
- Ferris Cook
You see it the way you see it. Nobody can see it
for someone else.
- Anette Waterbeek
"As a rule, men worry more about what
they can't see than about what they can."
- Julius Caesar
"Look at everything as though you were
seeing it for the first time or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory."
- Betty Smith,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
"The film of evening
light made the red earth lucent, so that its dimensions were deepened, so that a
stone, a post, a building, had greater depth, and more solidity than in any
daytime light; and these objects were curiously more individual- a post was more
essentially a post, set off from the earth it stood in and the field of corn it
stood out against. All plants were individuals, not the mass of crop; and the
ragged willow tree was itself, standing free of all other willow trees. The
earth contributed a light to the evening. The front of the gray, paintless
house, facing the west, was luminous as the moon is. The gray dusty truck, in
the yard before the door, stood out magically in this light, in the overdrawn
perspective of a stereopticon."
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
"Darkness is to space what
silence is to sound, i.e., the interval."
- Marshall McLuhan, Through the Vanishing Point
The knower and that which he knows
are both one, and he who unites and that with which he unites are one, and seer and seen are one.
- Ibn al-'Arabi
All my life I’ve looked at words
as though
I were seeing them for the first time.
- Ernest Hemingway
Earth’s crammed with heaven, and
every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees takes off his shoes.
- Elizabeth Barret Browning
To look at any thing,
If you would know that thing,
You must look at it long:
To look at this green and say,
"I have seen spring in these
Woods," will not do - you must
Be the thing you see:
You must be the dark snakes of
Stems and ferny plumes of leaves,
You must enter in
To the small silences between
The leaves,
You must take your time
And touch the very peace
They issue from.
- John Moffitt
Learn to see, and then you'll know that
there is no end to the new worlds of our vision.
- Carlos Castaneda
Seeing is
deceiving. It's eating that's believing.
- James Thurber
For the blind, people are
not there unless they speak.
People are in motion, they are temporal, they come and they go.
They come out of nothing; they disappear.
- Doug Murphey
One must look for one
thing only, to find many.
Cesare Pavese
Give to us clear vision that we may know
where to stand and what to stand for.
- Peter Marshall
December: Quotes, Poems, Sayings
Light is not so much
something that reveals,
as it is itself the revelation.
- James Turrell
You don't need eyes to see, you need vision.
- Maxi Jazz
The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are
a man's own eyes when they look upon his own person.
- Alexander Pope
I love the medium of
photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond
conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, "This is real, too."
- Winn Bullock
Meditation is not to
escape from society, but to come back to ourselves and see what is going on.
Once there is seeing, there must be acting. With mindfulness, we know what to do
and what not to do to help.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Think photographs
should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great
powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in
seeing people in new ways.
- Duane Michals
The ability to truly see, to look at this earth
as a painting waiting to be born through our fingers, is what separates us
artists from the rest of humanity.
- Mary Lapos
Zen in it's essence
is the art of seeing into the nature of one's being, and it points the way from
bondage to freedom.
- D. T. Suzuki
Man is equally
incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in
which he is engulfed.
- Blaise Pascal
"Compare the silent rose of the sun
And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell,
With this paper, this dust.
That states the point."
- Wallace Stevens
What you see is what you see.
- Frank Stella
The peony
Made him measure it
With his fan.
- Issa
made to measure it
with a fan...
the peony
- Issa
"The way in which the peony is considered as the active source of the measuring
of
itself is not merely good psychology, but shows us how Issa looks upon the
plant
world and upon himself. Compared to that of the
ordinary man, human beings
and plants are much closer together in the
thought-feeling world of Issa. The
flower stands there in
its color and glory. It does not bloom to be seen, nor
does
it wish to blush unseen. It is not dependent upon man, but
neither is it
independent of him. Its purposeless purpose is
fulfilled in its blooming in
solitude and silence, yet when no one is gazing
upon it, it has no shape or color
or fragrance. The
flower needs the mind, and the mind needs the flower for its
fulfillment.
Issa emphasizes the power and activity of the peony not only
because
we live in an egocentric, homocentric world, valueless and unpoetical,
but also
because he wishes to bring out the special nature of the peony, its
power and
magnificence, its lofty splendor. Is this splendor
in the flower? Does Issa
cause the flower to be measured, or
does the flower cause Issa to measure it?"
- R. H. Blyth,
Haiku, Volume 3, Summer-Autumn
This webpage has been moved to a new URL. This webpage is now being maintained, updated, and expanded at the following new location: http://www.egreenway.com/reason/vision.htm.
Sunsets are so beautiful that they almost seem as
if we were looking through the gates of heaven.
- John Lubbock
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this
world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of
people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can
see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion - all in one.
- John Ruskin
Sometimes not seeing
things can be a blessing.
- August Strinberg
Intelligence is
quickness in seeing things as they are.
- George Santayana
Look... don't see!
- Paul Sandip
"Our beliefs act as
lenses. These lenses can help us see things we can’t otherwise see, but they can
also block us from seeing parts of reality."
- Steve Pavlina
"Vision, I say, is related to
light itself. But of this sensation and the things pertaining to it, I pretend to
understand but little; and since even a long time would not suffice to explain
that trifle, or even to hint at an explanation, I pass over this in silence."
- Galileo Galilei
"How do we see physically? No
differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power
of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and
outer meaning."
- Novalis
"Squint a lot."
- Robert Levers
Art and Beauty - Quotes for Gardeners
Flowers -
Quotes for Gardeners
Floral
Radiographs: The Secret Garden by Dr. Albert Richards
The Gardener's Sutra: Pulling
Onions . By Michael P. Garofalo.
Headless Way For information on techniques for "seeing who you really are" visit the Headless Way. Techniques developed by Douglas E. Harding in On Having No Head are very useful.
Hearing - Quotes
for Gardeners
Inspirational
Quotes on Seeing
Just Binoculars Offering name brand binoculars, spotting
scopes and rangefinders for all uses including hunting, boating, horse racing,
traveling, vacationing, trips to Alaska and birding along with an extensive
buying guide to help make shopping easy.
Seeing, Hearing and
Smelling the World
Spirituality -
Quotes for Gardeners
The Spirit of Gardening
Website
Over 3,800 Quotations, Poems, Sayings, Quips, One-Liners, Clichés, Quotes, and
Insights
Arranged by Over 250 Topics
Over 15 Megabytes of Text
Over 20 Million Webpages (excluding graphics) Served to Readers Around the World
From January 1, 1999 through December 31,
2010
This webpage has been online since February of 1999.
Compiled by Karen Garofalo
and Mike Garofalo from Red
Bluff, California
E-Mail
Last Updated: March 18, 2013
This webpage has been moved to a new URL. This webpage is now being maintained, updated, and expanded at the following new location: http://www.egreenway.com/reason/vision.htm.
