"A traveler who looks at things with an impartial eye may see what the oldest inhabitant has not observed."
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Eye quotes
Eye
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Eye quotes (page 198 of 690)
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"We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes."
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"You must walk sometimes perfectly free, not prying or inquisitive, not bent on seeing things. Throw away a whole day for a single expansion, a single inspiration of air. You must walk so gently as to hear the finest sounds, the faculties being in repose. 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."
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"For my own part, I commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent."
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"You must not count much upon what I can do or learn in New York.... Everything there disappoints me but the crowd; rather, I was disappointed with the rest before I came. I have no eyes for their churches, and what else they find to brag of. Though I know but little about Boston, yet what attracts me, in a quiet way, seems much meaner and more pretending than there,--libraries, pictures, and faces in the street. You don't know where any respectability inhabits."
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"I don't like the city better, the more I see it, but worse. I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meanerthan I could have imagined.... The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population."
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"It is a very true and expressive phrase, "He looked daggers at me," for the first pattern and prototype of all daggers must have been a glance of the eye.... It is wonderful how we get about the streets without being wounded by these delicate and glancing weapons, a man can so nimbly whip out his rapier, or without being noticed carry it unsheathed. Yet it is rare that one gets seriously looked at."
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"Behold the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental. The former has nothing to do in this world; the latter is full of activity. The one looks in the sun until his eyes are put out; the other follows him prone in his westward course."
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"But the eyes, though they are no sailors, will never be satisfied with any model, however fashionable, which does not answer all the requisitions of art."
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"The eye which can appreciate the naked and absolute beauty of a scientific truth is far more rare than that which is attracted by a moral one."
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"Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf Than that I may not disappoint myself, That in my action I may soar as high As I can now discern with this clear eye."
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"Immense wealth, and its lavish expenditure, fill the great house with all that can please the eye, or tempt the taste. Here, appetite, not food, is the great desideratum."
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"All that the posture of skepticism accomplishes is to freeze the ego in an ignorantist poverty that never stretches or diversifies its resources of imagination or understanding. Any uncultured cretin can close his eyes and try to reduce the issues down to linear simplisms and say, "I am doubting, I am proving my magisterial or sovereign control over my own mind." Doubt is a useful and significant test of one's critical powers, but by itself it bears little if any significant cultural charge of enlightenment or satori; indeed it is the very opposite kind of thing."
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"It's been a long four years for Junior Nation. I am happy for his fans and NASCAR. Now, let's celebrate this win and help our sport grow. I have thought that ever since we took all our eyes and undivided attention off of Dale Jr. and gave him some breathing room, he was able to be more himself and relax a bit. Some of that pressure left him. Today we just saw the 'Old Dale Jr.,' the one we've been looking for, for a long time. He is back."
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"She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more — this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land."
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"People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour."
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"I've struck up a tremendous intimacy with Conte Alberto, and we literally can't live without each other. He is the first object my eyes greet in the morning, and the last at night."
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"The city grows like a cancer; I must grow like a sun. The city eats deeper and deeper into the red; it is an insatiable white louse which must die eventually of inanition. I am going to starve the white louse which is eating me up. I am going to die as a city in order to become again a man. Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth."
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"I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget."
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"I think it's much better to have your eyes open, but on the other hand, of course it can do harm if you tell people look, there's all these terrible things you can do and then some idiot may go ahead and do it."
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