When pain signals travel to the brain, the brain doesn't just passively receive that information — it actively decides how much attention to pay to it. This means that pain is not simply a readout of damage in the body; it's a construction of the mind.
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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