The obscure we see eventually, the completely apparent takes longer.

It is not the magnitude of our actions but the place they fill in our life that makes them great or small. Obscurity enlarges objects; and great men are not always such in the eyes of their valets.

We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. And when we change, all things change with us — not because the world has shifted, but because the lens through which we read it has.

The brain is wider than the sky, for, put them side by side, the one the other will contain with ease, and you beside.

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us. The poet who walks by moonlight knows that the moon is the sun and that the darkness is a brilliant day.

We are enslaved by anything we do not consciously see. We are freed by conscious perception.

We are apt to think that our ideas are a measure of things; but they are only a measure of ourselves.

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature.

A fact is not a truth until you love it.

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts. To a man who is indifferent to beauty, the Sistine ceiling is only paint on plaster.

The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in its end, it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a convention of cartographers.

We are compelled to feel that the world presented to our senses is not the world as it really is, but only the world as it appears to beings constituted as we are. The thing in itself remains forever unknowable.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it in the same stone, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.

We arrive at truth, not by the reason alone, but by the whole man. Genius is the recovery of childhood at will—the power to live, think, and act in childhood again; so all great poets are necessarily children, in the sense that they retain the power of wonder and the capacity to see the world as if for the first time.

The mind does not work by way of ideas, but by way of passionate preferences; we do not see nature, we see our idea of nature.

The mind is a collection of surfaces, and we must learn to read the signs written upon them—to distinguish between the scratches of accident and the marks of intention.

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.

We do not remember days, we remember moments. The gods, not being human, have mercifully forgotten the days and the years, the stretch of foul weather and the long dull reaches of our lives, and have retained only the bright moments: thus our lives are high-lighted and dramatic with the deus ex machina and the tragedy of unforeseen events.

The eye is not merely a physical organ, but the supreme instrument of the mind; it is the only sense that can perceive beauty, and beauty is the only thing that makes life worth living.

We do not remember days, we remember moments. The gods, not being human, have pleasantly forgotten the days and the years of the universe and have kept only a few moments of beauty wherewith to refresh themselves.

The human mind is like a flashlight in the dark. It illuminates a small circle of the world around us, but beyond that circle lies an infinite darkness that we can never fully penetrate.

To know the world one must construct it. One does not go for a walk in order to walk but to construct the world at each step.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and to avoid others, to make much of some impressions, little of others. It is thus a subjective instrument, and bears the stamp of subjectivity upon all it apprehends.

The mind has shown itself capable of grasping the incomprehensible; it has stood in the presence of the infinite and perceived it as finite; it has measured the unmeasurable and found dimensions.

The eye is not merely a physical organ, but the supreme instrument of touch, and we see only with our eyes open to the world; blindness is not the absence of sight but the refusal to look.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and ignore the rest. The immediate fact which the science of logic has to take account of is that certain material is presented, certain aspects of this material are noted and emphasized.

The true paradox of consciousness is that we become most fully conscious precisely when we lose the sense of being conscious at all, when the instrument becomes so perfectly attuned to its object that subject and object merge into one continuous act of perception.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are indifferent to others, remaining by nature blind to facts that are uncongenial to them.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are on the alert for them, and especially apt to be lively and to produce the感 of reality whenever they are stimulated.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are negative to others, making us accept or reject much that we might theoretically be indifferent to.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol. I naturally dress my thoughts in pictures.

The true paradox of consciousness is that the more narrowly we examine it, the more it seems to elude us, as if consciousness were not an object to be grasped but a field in which the grasping occurs.