Quotes for Those that Love
Gardens, Gardening and the Green Way
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
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 eyes are the window of the soul.
- English Proverb
I shut my eyes in order to see.
- Paul Gauguin
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
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
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
If you go as far as you can see,
you will then see enough to go even farther.
- John Wooden
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
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
If you desire to see, learn how to
act.
- Heinz von Foerster, Observing Systems
The eyes envy the mind.
- Chuang Tzu
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
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
Hearing - Quotes for Gardeners
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
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
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
The eyes have one language
everywhere.
George Herbert
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,
Floral Radiographs: The Secret Garden by Dr. Albert Richards
Art and Beauty - Quotes for Gardeners
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
You can observe a lot by just
watching.
- Yogi Berra
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
Quotes for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes, Arranged by 130 Topics
Many of the Topics also have Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
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
A poor life this if, full of care, we
have no time to stand and stare.
- William Henry Davies
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
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
Observe things as they are and don't
pay attention to other people.
- Huang Po.
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
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 , One Short of a Baker's Dozen
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing
upon the shoulders of giants.
- Isaac Newton
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
The hardest thing to explain
is the glaringly evident
which everybody has decided not to see.
- Ayn Rand
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, p. 52
If you gaze for long, the abyss also
gazes into you.
- Nietzsche
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
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
One's
destination is never aplace
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 ethe perfect, indivisible experience.
- R. H. Blyth,
Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, p.84
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
I paint objects as I
think them; not as I see them.
- Pablo Picasso
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
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
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
Flowers - Quotes for Gardeners
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
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
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
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 Tsu
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
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
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
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
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
Quotes for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes, Arranged by 130 Topics
Many of the Topics also have Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
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
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
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
It is the familiar that usually
eludes us in life.
What is before our nose is what we see last.
- William Barrett
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
Spirituality - Quotes for Gardeners
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
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
... 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
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
What is art but a way
of seeing.
- Thomas Berger
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
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
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
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
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
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 come sover 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
The only limits are, as always, those of
vision.
- James Broughton
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 criticises before he has apprehended,
he condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself.
- Arthur
Symons Quotations
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
Green Way Blog by Mike Garofalo
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
colours; 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
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
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-
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
If your garden was there before you were,
chances are it grew out of many other's dreams.
- Ferris Cook
"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 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
Light is not so much
something that reveals,
as it is itself the revelation.
- James Turrell
"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
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
The Amateur Naturalist. By Gerald Durrell. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Index, glossary, charts, 320 pages. A fine introduction to observing, studying, collecting, and preserving natural objects. A strong emphasis on the tools, techniques, and methods of natural history study. Observation techniques organized by different ecological niches.
Color in Your Garden. By Penelope Hobhouse.
Little, Brown and Company, 1985.
The Gardener's Eye and Other Essays. By Allen Lacy, 1936-
N.Y., Henry Holt and Co., An Owl Book, c 1992. 282 pages, index. ISBN:
0-8050-3952-X. Mr. Lacy is one of the top garden writers in America.
He has written a column for the New York Times since 1985, and has been a
columnist for The Wall Street Journal and Horticulture. Along
with being the author of ten books, and the editor of four, he is also a Professor
of Philosophy at Stockton State College in New Jersey. This book reflects his love
of gardens, excellent literary style, careful and beautiful descriptions, wide and deep
understanding of gardening, and clear insights into the aesthetics of gardens and the
human side of gardening.
The Gardener's Sutra: Pulling
Onions . By Michael P. Garofalo. 115kb+.
The Harmonious Garden: Color, Form and Texture.
By Catherine Ziegler. Timber Press, 1996.
How to Shoot Your Garden: Tips from a Pro on Capturing Your Personal Eden on Film.
By Bart Barlow. Country Living Gardener, October
1999, pp. 72-79.
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.
The Plant Observer's Guide Book: A Field Botany Manual for the Amateur
Naturalist. By Charles E. Roth. New York, Prentice Hall, 1984.
Readings to Uplift a Gardener's Spirits Prepared by
Michael P. Garofalo. An annotated bibliography in progress.
Spirituality and Concerns of the Soul
Simplicity and the Simple Life
Haiku Poetry - Links and References
Cliches for Gardeners and Farmers
The History of Gardening
Timeline
From
Ancient Times to the 20th Century
Short Poems and Haiku by Michael P. Garofalo
Quotes for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A
Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes, Arranged by 130 Topics
Many
of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled
by Michael P. Garofalo
Distributed on the Internet by Michael P. Garofalo
I Welcome Your Comments, Ideas,
Contributions, and Suggestions
E-mail Mike Garofalo in Red Bluff, California
A Short Biography of Mike Garofalo
Seeing - Quotes for Gardeners. Version
7.2
Distributed on the Internet since 1999
Cloud Hands: Taijiquan and Qigong
The History of Gardening Timeline