Most people think of pain as a signal from the body — a warning that something is wrong. But Yoni Ashar and his colleagues found that for many people with chronic back pain, the signal had become decoupled from any actual tissue damage. The brain had learned to generate pain on its own, independent of what was happening in the body.
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The vociferous catastrophes of a general order — fires, wars, epidemics — are one single pain, illusorily multiplied in many mirrors.
Jorge Luis Borges
The obscure we see eventually, the completely apparent takes longer.
Edward R. Murrow — attributed remark, collected in Murrow: His Life and Times
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.
Eugène Delacroix — Journal