Seeing, Looking, Watching, Vision, Perspective: Quotations, Sayings, Widsom, Poetry, Aphorisms, Quips, Facts, Comments

"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

"The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing."
- Pierre Bonnard

"Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind; and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind."
- William Shakespeare

"The microscope is man's noblest, supreme, and most far-reaching tool."
- Adrianus Pijper

"People follow shapes and masses of color and rarely look with the same attention at an object once it is set in our memory. We 'see' by symbols."
- Raul Gonzalez

"Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens."
- Carl Jung

"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

"I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order."
- John Burroughs

"We do not see everything in the environment in the complete, totally resolved, explicit character of the photograph. We, in fact, prioritize our seeing."
- Burton Silverman

"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

"Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked."
- Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal

"If you go as far as you can see, you will then see enough to go even farther."
- John Wooden

"Equipped with our five senses - along with telescopes and microscopes and mass spectrometers and seismographs and magnetometers and particle accelerators and detectors sensitive to the entire electromagnetic spectrum - we explore the universe around us and call the adventure science."
- Edwin Hubble

"The object of our lives is to look at, listen to, touch, taste things. Without them, - these sticks, stones, feathers, shells, - there is no Deity."
- R. H. Blyth, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, p. 144.

"What is seen by the eye is transformed and colored by the vision of the mind."
- Robert Wade

"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

"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

"Subject is known by what she sees."
- Allen Ginsberg, Mind Writing Slogans

"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

"See the planes of light as shapes, the planes of shadows as shapes. Squint your eyes and find the big, fluent shapes."
- Irwin Greenberg

"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

"One sees more with one's fingers than with one's glasses.
Man sihet jtzund mer durch die finger denn durch die brillen"

"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

"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

"Sight is valued above all other senses. True, we can be persuaded that touch and hearing are more basic─the one to survival, the other to the acquisition of language. Nevertheless, sight enjoys primacy. It immediately gives us a world "out there." Self, without a world, is reduced to mere body. All senses give us a world, but the visual one has the greatest definition and scope. This expansive visual world is both sensual and intellectual. It is sensual, not only because of its colors and shapes, but also because of its tactile quality: we can almost feel what we see─smile with pleasure as we look at a fluffy blanket. It is intellectual because somehow to see is to think and to understand: sight is coupled with insight, and to exercise the mind is to see with "the mind's eye." Perhaps most important of all, the primacy of sight rests on a simple experience. Open our eyes, and the world spreads before us in all its vividness and color; close them, and it is instantly wiped out and we are plunged in darkness. One moment, the world is an enticing space inviting us to enter; the next, it collapses to the limit of our body and we are helplessly disoriented."
- Yi-Fu Tuan, Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture, 1995, p. 96.

“Where the telescope ends the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?”
- Victor Hugo

"A friend's son was in the first grade of school, and his teacher asked the class, "What is the color of apples?" Most of the children answered red. A few said green. Kevinn, my friend's son, raised his hand and said white. The teacher tried to explain that apples could be red, green or sometimes golden, but never white. Kevin was quite insistent and finally said, "Look inside." Perception without mindfulness keeps us on the surface of things, and we often miss other levels of reality."
- Joseph Goldstein, Insight Meditation

"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

"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

"By the help of microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible world discovered to the understanding."
- Robert Hooke

"Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more - more unseen forms become manifest to him."
- Rumi

"To see things in black and white is to see the basics, and I would recommend to any designer of gardens that he go out and look at his work by the light of the moon."
- Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts, 1981

"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

"Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being"
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Rhodora

"Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen to see;
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency."
- Emily Dickinson

"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

"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

"Everything you see is a reflection of itself. You move around and you are a reflection of what is next to you."
- Grace Paleg

"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

"The human eye is an organ which reacts to light for several purposes. As a conscious sense organ, the mammalian eye allows vision. Rod and cone cells in the retina allow conscious light perception and vision including color differentiation and the perception of depth. The human eye can distinguish about 10 million colors. In common with the eyes of other mammals, the human eye's non-image-forming photosensitive ganglion cells in the retina receive the light signals which affect adjustment of the size of the pupil, regulation and suppression of the hormone melatonin and entrainment of the body clock."
- The Human Eye - Wikipedia

"We never see anything completely. We never see a tree, we see the tree through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti

"On the face of it, the easiest of all activities should be seeing what we see. In reality, it's the hardest."
- Charles Movalli

"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 Garofalo, Above the Fog

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."
- Isaac Newton

"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

"The freedom that nature-mystics look for beyond the human scene is like the spiritual realm of the religious, a human thought-construction. Seeking to escape yourself by chasing your own shadow is a vain pursuit. But if you look with eyes that are not covered with a film of thought, you may come to a scene that can only be seen once."

"Without the eye, the head is blind. Without the head, the eye is adrift."
- Darby Bannard

"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

"We found Matisse living in a small house, with a magnificent, sweeping view beyond his vegetable garden. In one room there was a cage with a lot of fluttering birds. The place was covered with paintings, most of them obviously new ones. I marveled at his production and I asked him, "What is your inspiration?" "I grow artichokes," he said. His eyes smiled at my surprise and he went on to explain: "Every morning I go into the garden and watch these plants. I see the play of light and shade on the leaves and I discover new combinations of colors and fantastic patterns. I study them. They inspire me. Then I go back to the studio and paint."
- Andre Kostelanetz, This I Believe, 1952

"What is the color of your head from the standpoint of your eyes? You feel that you head is black, or that it has not any color at all. Outside you see your field of vision as an oval because your two eyes act as two centers of an ellipse. But what is beyond the field of vision? What color is it where you can't see? It is not black, and this is an important point; there is no color at all beyond your field of vision. This little mental exercise gives us an idea of what is mean by the character hsüan. Although its dictionary definition is "dark, deep, obscure," it actually refers to this kind of no color that is the color of your head - as far as your eyes are concerned. Perhaps we could say that the invisibility of one's head, in a certain sense the lack of a head, is the secret of being alive. To be headless, or have no head in just the same sense I am talking about, is our way of talking about the Chinese expression wu hsin, or "no mind." As a matter of fact, if you want to see the inside of your head all you have to do is keep your eyes open, because all that you are experiencing in the external, visual field is a state of your brain."
- Alan Watts, Swimming Headless, 1966

"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

"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

"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

"A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones."
- Lord Chesterfield

"The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is."
- Kahlil Gibran

"One's destination is never a place 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 the perfect, indivisible experience."
- R. H. Blyth, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, p.84

"Same old eyes, same old world but the difference is how you look at what is in front of you, not what it is."
- Lister Sinclair

"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

"Probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realize it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible."
- Philip Guston

"The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind couldn't detect."
- Mark Twain

"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

"My work isn't about form. It's about seeing. I'm excited about seeing things, and I'm interested in the way I think other people see things."
- Roy Lichtenstein

"Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens."
- Carl Jung

"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

"Look at the soil, feel the soil, smell the soil: The Beginning!
Wise is the person who sees the cherry trees in bloom and does not say "life is not a bowl of cherries."
Looking at your garden involves far more than your eyes.
Once we stop looking we often see It right away.
What I make of my garden depends upon how close I stand to it.
Gardening tempts you to look, again and again, until the novel is seen.
If you keep looking for one thing, you will find many.
A poverty of vision is not the only limitation.
Sensations flow with the seasons.
Seeing with one eye and feeling with the other does help bring things into focus.
Gardening boils down to doing and seeing for yourself."
- Mike Garofalo, Pulling Onions

"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

"Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom."
- Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom

"The gifts of microscopes to our understanding of cells and organisms is so profound that one has to ask: What are the gifts of the microscopist? Here is my opinion. The gift of the great microscopist is the ability to "Think with the eyes and see with the brain." Deep revelations into the nature of living things continue to travel on beams of light."
- Daniel Mazia

"There will always be those who must look into the dark in order to see."
- Alan McGlashan

"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 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

"The eyes that see God are the same eyes through which God sees me."
- Meister Eckhart

"Why has not Man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly.
Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n,
T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n."
- Alexander Pope

"Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing."
- Bill Cosby

"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

"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

"Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things."
- Edward Steichen

"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 having 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

"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful."
- Henri Poicare

"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

"Seeing, in the finest and broadest sense, means using your senses, your intellect, and your emotions. It means encountering your subject matter with your whole being. It means looking beyond the labels of things and discovering the remarkable world around you."
- Freeman Patterson

"As long as there is a hunger for knowledge and a deep desire to uncover the truth, microscopy will continue to unveil Mother Nature’s deepest and most beautiful secrets."
- Lelio Orci

"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

"We do a lot of looking: we look through lenses, telescopes, television tubes... Our looking is perfected every day, but we see less and less."
- Frederick Franck

"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

"Nature composes some of her loveliest music for the microscope and telescope."
- Theodore Roszak

"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 Tzu

"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)

"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

"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

"Now is the time of the illuminated woods ... when every leaf glows like a tiny lamp."
- J. Burroughs

"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

"If you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it for the 1000th time, you are in danger of seeing it for the first time."
- G. K. Chesterton

"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

"We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon."
- Konrad Adenauer

"Close your bodily eye, that you may see your picture first with the eye of the spirit. Then bring to light what you have seen in the darkness, that its effect may work back, from without to within."
- Caspar David Friedrich

"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

"Nature composes some of her lovliest poems for the microscope and the telescope."
- Theodore Roszak

"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist."
- Oscar Wilde

"It is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our nose is what we see last."
- William Barrett

"My spirit has ways of seeing that my eyes cannot comprehend."
- Philippe Benichou

"I learn from everything I look at, good, bad or indifferent. I follow my eye reflexively; if it is drawn toward something, I pay attention and try to find out why. You train your eye, build up a mental image bank, and constantly try to pinpoint why some things are convincing and others aren't."
- Roberta Smith

"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

"Seeing is such a privilege. Who notices the way the screech of a gull looks, the look of a gale, the sight of some fragrance?"
- Keith Crown

"Zen is like looking for the spectacles that are sitting on your nose."
- Zen aphorism

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."
- William Blake

"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

"I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow."
- David Hobson

"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."
- Marcus Aurelius

"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

"It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

"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

"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

"If we see an object as a "bowl," it may inhibit seeing it as "craft," just as seeing it as "craft" might inhibit seeing it as "art." See first; name later."
- Darby Bannard

"One who returns to a place sees it with new eyes. Although the place may not have changed, the viewer inevitably has. For the first time things invisible before become suddenly visible."
- Louis L'Amour

"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."
- William 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

"It takes time to really see. Seeing is in itself an art. Perhaps that is what art is, the crystalization of a vision."
- Mary Jean Mailloux

"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

"I could paint these mountains the way they look, but it isn't how I see them."
- Justin Beckett

"When a good poet looks at an object with the eyes in his head, he sees more than merely accurately."
- John Andrew Holmes

"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

"It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see."
- Alberto Giacometh

"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 comes over 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 greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses."
- Hanna Rion

"Fundamentally, art is a way of seeing rather than of doing or making."
- Alan Jarvis

"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 criticizes before he has apprehended, he condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself."
- Arthur Symons

"Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing."
- Camille Pissarro

"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

"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

"It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter."
- John Updike

"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

"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 colors; 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

"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

"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

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
- Oscar Wilde

"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

"You see it the way you see it. Nobody can see it for someone else. "
- Anette Waterbeek

"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

"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

"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

"The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man's own eyes when they look upon his own person."
- Alexander Pope

"I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, "This is real, too." "
- Winn Bullock

"Meditation is not to escape from society, but to come back to ourselves and see what is going on. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. With mindfulness, we know what to do and what not to do to help."
- Thich Nhat Hanh

"Think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways."
- Duane Michals

"The ability to truly see, to look at this earth as a painting waiting to be born through our fingers, is what separates us artists from the rest of humanity."
- Mary Lapos

"Zen in it's essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom."
- D. T. Suzuki

"Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed."
- Blaise Pascal

"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 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

"Sunsets are so beautiful that they almost seem as if we were looking through the gates of heaven."
- John Lubbock

"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

"Our beliefs act as lenses. These lenses can help us see things we can’t otherwise see, but they can also block us from seeing parts of reality."
- Steve Pavlina

Reading Recommendations

Seeing, Visual Perception, Aesthetics, Visual Arts

Headless Way 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.

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.

Months and Seasons Quotes, Poems, Sayings, Verses, Lore, Myths, Holidays Celebrations, Folklore, Reading, Links, Quotations Information, Weather, Gardening Chores Compiled by Mike Garofalo
Winter	Spring	Summer	Fall
January	April	July	October
February	May	August	November
March	June	September	December

Vision
Seeing, Looking, Watching, Insight, Sight
Perspective, Observing, Foresight

Quotations, Sayings, Aphorisms, Clichés, Quips, Quotes, Wisdom, Poetry, Facts, Comments

Prepared by Michael P. Garofalo, M.S.
Green Way Research, Red Bluff, California

The Five Senses Cloud Hands Blog

The Good Life Website Spirit of Gardening

"The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
- Marcel Proust

"The country habit has me by the heart,
For he's bewitched forever who has seen,
Not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring
Flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun."
- Vita Sackville-West

"To see things in black and white is to see the basics, and I would recommend to any designer of gardens that he go out and look at his work by the light of the moon."
- Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts, 1981

"The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses."
- Hanna Rion

Reading Recommendations

Seeing, Visual Perception, Aesthetics, Visual Arts

Vision Seeing, Looking, Watching, Insight, Sight Perspective, Observing, Foresight

Quotations, Sayings, Aphorisms, Clichés, Quips, Quotes, Wisdom, Poetry, Facts, Comments

Prepared by Michael P. Garofalo, M.S. Green Way Research, Red Bluff, California

The Five Senses Cloud Hands Blog

The Good Life Website Spirit of Gardening

"The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust

"The country habit has me by the heart, For he's bewitched forever who has seen, Not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring Flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun." - Vita Sackville-West

"To see things in black and white is to see the basics, and I would recommend to any designer of gardens that he go out and look at his work by the light of the moon." - Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts, 1981

"The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses." - Hanna Rion

Reading Recommendations

Seeing, Visual Perception, Aesthetics, Visual Arts

Vision
Seeing, Looking, Watching, Insight, Sight
Perspective, Observing, Foresight

Prepared by Michael P. Garofalo, M.S.
Green Way Research, Red Bluff, California

"The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
- Marcel Proust

"The country habit has me by the heart,
For he's bewitched forever who has seen,
Not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring
Flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun."
- Vita Sackville-West

"To see things in black and white is to see the basics, and I would recommend to any designer of gardens that he go out and look at his work by the light of the moon."
- Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts, 1981

"The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses."
- Hanna Rion