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"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
"My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is."
"Yet mystery and imagination arise from
the same source. This source is called darkness .. Darkness within
darkness, the gateway to all understanding."
- Lao Tzu
"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
“The important thing is not
to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
- Albert Einstein
"The finest thing we can
experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the
cradle of true art and true science. He who does not know it and can no longer
wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle."
- Albert Einstein
"No object is mysterious. The
mystery is your eye."
- Elizabeth Bowen
"The eyes are the gateway to the
soul."
- Herman Melville
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as
we are."
- Anais Nin
"Your vision will
become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside,
dreams; who looks inside, awakens."
- Carl Jung
"Don't overlook the obvious."
- Verna Reid
"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
"There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a
miracle."
- Abert Einstein
"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
January: Quotes, Poems, Sayings
"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
"God is the experience
of looking at a tree and saying, "Ah!""
- Joseph Campbell
"I did however used to think,
you know, in the woods walking, and as a kid playing the the woods, that there was a kind of
immanence there - that woods, a places of that order, had a sense, a kind of presence, that you could feel; that there was something peculiarly, physically present, a feeling of place almost conscious ... like God. It evoked that."
- Robert Creely, Robert Creely and the Genius
of the American Common Place, p. 40
“The world is full of magic
things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
- William Butler Yeats
"The first act of awe, when
man was struck with the beauty or wonder of Nature, was the first spiritual experience."
- Henryk Skolimowski
"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
"Even before I could speak, I
remember crawling through blueberry patches in the wild meadows on our
hillsides.
I quickly discovered Nature was filled with Spirit; I never saw any separation
between Spirit and Nature.
Much later I discovered our culture taught there was supposed to be some kind of
separation -
that God, Spirit and Nature were supposed to be divided and different.
However, at my early age it
seemed absolutely obvious that the church of the Earth was the greatest church
of all; that the temple
of the forest was the supreme temple. When I went to the sanctuary of the
mountain, I found Earth's
natural altar - Great Spirit's real shrine. Years later I discovered that
this path of going into Nature,
bonding deeply with it, and seeing Spirit within Nature - God, Goddess, and
Great Spirit - was
humanity's most ancient, most primordial path of spiritual cultivation and
realization."
- John P. Milton, Sky Above, Earth Below
"In all things of nature there is something
marvelous."
- Aristotle
"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
“Look at everything as
though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your
time on earth will be filled with glory.”
- Betty Smith, Joy in the Morning
"We are a landscape of all we have seen."
- Isamu Noguchi
"Wonder is the beginning of
wisdom."
- Socrates
"When we touch this domain, we are
filled with the cosmic force of life itself, we sink our roots deep into the black soil and draw power and being up into ourselves. We know the energy of the numen and are saturated with power and being. We feel grounded, centered, in touch with the ancient and eternal rhythms of life. Power and passion well up like an artesian spring and creativity dances in celebration of life."
- David N. Elkins
"The whole of life lies in the verb seeing."
- Teilhard De Chardin
"We men of Earth have here the stuff
Of Paradise - we have enough!
We need no other stones to build
The Temple of the Unfulfilled -
No other ivory for the doors -
No other marble for the floors -
No other cedar for the beam
And dome of man's immortal dream.
Here on the paths of every-day -
Here on the common human way
Is all the stuff the gods would take
To build a Heaven, to mold and make
New Edens. Ours is the stuff sublime
To build Eternity in time!"
- Edwin Markham, Earth is Enough
February: Quotes, Poems, Sayings
"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
“Do you ever wonder why
things have to turn out the way they do?”
- Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember
"When the healthy nature of man acts
as a whole, when he feels himself to be
in the world as in a great, beautiful, noble, and valued whole, when harmonious
ease affords him a pure and free delight, then the universe, if it could experience
itself, would exult, as having attained its goal, and admire the climax of its
own becoming and essence."
- Goethe
"Do not, I beg you, look for anything
behind phenomena.
They are themselves their own lesson."
- Goethe
"One cannot but be in awe when one
contemplates the mysteries of
eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough
if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.
Never lose a holy curiosity."
- Albert Einstein
"What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch,
These are the measures destined for her soul."
- Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning, 1915
"A little group of thatched cottages
in the middle of the village had an
orchard attached; and I remember well the peculiar purity of the blue
sky seen through the white clusters of apple blossom in spring. I
remember being moonstruck looking at it one morning early on my
way to school. It meant something for me; what, I couldn't say. It
gave me such an unease at heart, some reaching out towards
perfection such as impels men into religion, some sense of the
transcendence of things, of the fragility of our hold on life."
- A. L. Rowse
"I've read all the books but one
Only remains sacred: this
Volume of wonders, open
Always before my eyes."
- Kathleen Raine
"Learn to see, and then you'll know
that there is no end to the new worlds of our vision."
- Carlos Castaneda
“When you don't cover up the
world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that
was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became
possessed by thought.”
- Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"The secret of beginning a life of deep
awareness and sensitivity lies in our willingness to pay attention. Our
growth as conscious, awake human beings is marked not so much by grand
gestures and visible renunciations as by extending loving attention to the
minutest particulars of our lives. Every relationship, every thought, every
gesture is blessed with meaning through the wholehearted attention we bring
to it. In the complexities of our minds and lives we easily forget the power
of attention, yet without attention we live only on the surface of
existence. It is just simple attention that allows us truly to listen to the
song of a bird, to see deeply the glory of an autumn leaf, to touch the
heart of another and be touched. We need to be fully present in order to
love a single thing wholeheartedly. We need to be fully awake in this moment
if we are to receive and respond to the learning inherent in it."
- Christina Feldman and Jack Kornfield, Stories of the
Spirit, Stories of the Heart
“He who is certain he knows the ending of
things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely
foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put
a knife in the heart of wonder.”
- Tad Williams, The Dragonbone Chair
"There is no language of the holy.
The sacred lies in the ordinary."
- Deng Ming-Dao
“That's the whole problem with
science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of
unimaginable wonder.”
- Bill Watterson
"Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for
seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being"
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Rhodora
"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
"The invariable mark of wisdom is to
see the miraculous in the common."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If I had influence with the good
fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should
ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so
indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote
against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile
preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our
strength.”
- Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
"Gardening often straightens the
body and aligns the spirit.
It is more about You and Now, rather than Them and Back Then.
There is not much to say
about the "Unknown."
To dig is to discover.
The Ten Thousand Things are more enchanting than the Silent One.
Rather than "love mankind," it'd rather admire a few good
people.
A callused palm and dirty fingernails
precede a Green Thumb.
Complexity is closer to the Truth.
Sitting in a garden and doing nothing is high art everywhere.
Does a plum tree with no fruit have Buddha Nature? Whack!!
The only Zen you'll find flowering in the garden is the Zen you bring there each
day.
A garden is quite ordinary,
yet still sacred.
Dogmatists are less useful than dogs.
This cabbage, these carrots, these potatoes, these onions ..
will soon become me. Such a tasty fact!
It is best to shut one's mouth when facing the sacred.
Time creeps, wals, runs and flies - it is all about moving
things.
Inside the gardener is the spirit of the
garden outside.
Dearly respect the lifestyle of worms.
All enlightened beings are enchanted by water.
Becoming invisible to oneself is one pure act of gardening.
Priapus, lively and naughty, aroused and outlandish, is the Duende de el Jardin.
Inside the gardener is the spirit of the garden outside.
Gardening is a kind of deadheading - keeping us from going to seed.
The joyful gardener is evidence of an incarnation.
One purpose of a garden is to stop time.
Leafing is the practice of seeds.
Remember that the River of Forgetfulness flows
by the Elysian Fields.
People who speak loudly about the "One True Religion" scare the
ship out of most of us.
No body then no mind; no mind then a useless body.
When the Divine knocks, don't send a
prophet to the door.
Most Laws of Gardening are merely local ordinances. "
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling
Onions
“Patience never wants
Wonder to enter the house: because Wonder is a wretched guest. It uses all of
you but is not careful with what is most fragile or irreplaceable. If it breaks
you, it shrugs and moves on. Without asking, Wonder often brings along dubious
friends: doubt, jealousy, greed. Together they take over; rearrange the
furniture in every one of your rooms for their own comfort. They speak odd
languages but make no attempt to translate for you. They cook strange meals in
your heart that leave odd tastes and smells. When they finally go are you happy
or miserable? Patience is always left holding the broom.”
- Jonathan Carroll, White Apples
"The beauty of the trees,
the softness of the air,
the fragrance of the grass,
speaks to me.
The summit of the mountain,
the thunder of the sky,
speaks to me.
The faintness of the stars,
the trail of the sun,
the strength of fire,
and the life that never goes away,
they speak to me.
And my heart soars."
- Chief Dan George
“The pursuit of truth and beauty is a
sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our
lives.”
- Albert Einstein
"There is a twofold
meaning in every creature, a literal and a mystical, and the one is but the ground of the other."
- John Smith
"The sacred tree, the sacred stone are
not adored as stone or tree; they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but sacred, the
ganz andere or
'wholly other.'"
- Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries
"I prefer to their dogma my excursions into
the natural gardens
where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of
birds, the rippling of might waters, the sweet breathing of flowers, and a wee child toddling in a wonder world. If this
is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a Pagan."
- Gertrude Simmons Bonnin,
"Zitkala-Sa"
“I think us here to wonder,
myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking
bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But
you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The
more I wonder, the more I love.”
- Alice Walker, The Color Purple
"Wherever you are is home
And the earth is paradise
Wherever you set your feet is holy land . . .
You don't live off it like a parasite.
You live in it, and it in you,
Or you don't survive.
And that is the only worship of God there is."
- Wilfred Pelletier and Ted Poole
"This morning outside I
stood
I saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
Singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head
I remember when church let out
How things have changed since then
Everything is Holy Now
It used to be a world half there
Heaven's second rate hand me
down
But I walk it with a reverent
air
'Cause everything is Holy Now"
Everything, Everything, Everything is Holy Now"
- Holy
Now by Peter Mayer
“The feeling of awed wonder that science can
give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.
It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can
deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does
so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for
living is quite finite.”
- Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and
the Appetite for Wonder
"What
has happened
makes
the world.
Live
on the edge,
looking."
- Robert Creeley, Here
"If you gaze for long, the abyss also
gazes into you."
- Nietzsche
"One's
destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things."
- Henry
Miller
“We are perishing for want
of wonder, not for want of wonders.”
- G.K. Chesterton
"If the doors of perception were
cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."
- William Blake
“I would rather have a mind
opened by wonder than one closed by belief.”
- Gerry Spence
"Straight up from this road
Away from the fitted particles of frost
Coating the hull of each chick pea,
And the stiff archer bug making its way
In the morning dark, toe hair by toe hair,
Up the stem of the trillim,
Straight up through the sky above this road right now,
The galaxies of the Cygnus A cluster
Are colliding with each other in a massive swarm
Of interpenetrating and exploding catastrophes.
I try to remember that."
- Pattiann Rogers, Firekeeper
"The true mystery of the world is
the visible, not the invisible."
- Oscar Wilde
“O, wonder! How many goodly
creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has
such people in't!”
- William Shakespeare
“The more clearly we can
focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the
less taste we shall have for destruction.”
- Rachel Carson
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
"The most beautiful emotion is the
mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion
is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as
dead. To know that which is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting
itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull
faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge,
this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in
this sense only, I belong to the rank of a devoutly religious man."
- Albert Einstein
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
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: September 28, 2012
