We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. The universe is wider than our views of it, and we should look not merely through a knothole, but with our whole head out of the gable.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting. We talk of deviations from human form, but the truly repulsive is the face that has no character, that is habitual.

The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the astute person is not one who perceives the truth but one who is most adept at bending it.

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. And what we are is largely what we have consented to become, through the daily, unremarked choices that accumulate into a character — and finally a fate.

The naturalist is not the man who observes most, but the man who is most astonished by what he observes. To see the ordinary with extraordinary eyes — that is the whole of science.

The universe is transformation; life is opinion. Things do not touch the soul, for they are external and remain without; but our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within.

The universe is wider than our views of it. Yet we should oftener look over the taffrail of our craft like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum.

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes. And yet, when you have seen it, the whole world is altered.

It is not so much that I have a new theory of the universe to offer, as that I wish to call attention to certain habits of mind which prevent men from seeing what is before their eyes.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inveterate as it is pernicious, and yet it is one that we commit every day without knowing it.

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

The question is not what you look at, but what you see. 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, to be overcome by its strangeness and wonder.

We are compelled to feel that the world of our experience is not the world of reality, and yet it is only through the world of experience that we can come to know any world at all.

We are always acting on what has just finished happening, and reflecting on what is about to begin. The moment of pure presence is always receding.

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts. He who has learned to love a flower has learned something of the secret of being at home in the world.

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

It is not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats. And yet we speak of the horse as the cause of motion, and the oats as mere fuel. So we misread almost every force that moves us.

The observations of others, even our nearest and dearest, are usually quite wide of the mark; and even if they do occasionally hit it, the shot is apt to be more painful than profitable.

We think we see the sun rise and set; it is the earth that moves. So with human affairs; we fancy we are active; we are swept along like the rest.

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

Every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

The universe is transformation; life is opinion. If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.

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.