Quotes & Sayings About Myopia

Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is fully accepted as unbreakable law; or those who have, by their own methods, arrived at clear and unshakeable convictions about what to do and what to be that brook no possible doubt. I can only say that those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-induced myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human. — Isaiah Berlin

To those who think them selves strong, force always seems the easiest solution. — Barbara W. Tuchman

One of the illnesses that often afflicts leaders is myopia. We begin to think that the story we are living and writing is the story. We become laser focused on our own goals, accomplishments, and responsibilities. But a habit of faith takes the pressure off. It reminds you that there is a bigger story of which yours is only one part. It allows us to stop worrying about what others are saying about us and instead consider what God might be saying to us. — Brad Lomenick

The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds. — Georg Cantor

For too long the ideal role of the individual in our society - the role the talented young have aspired to almost by convention - has been that of the specialist. It has surely become as plain as it needs to be that what we need most now are not the specialists with their narrowed vision and short-range justifications, but men of sympathy and imagination and free intelligence who can recognize and hold themselves answerable to the complex responsibilities of a man's life in the world. — Wendell Berry

So when one adjusts for population size, the availability bias, and historical myopia, it is far from clear that the 20th century was the bloodiest in history. Sweeping that dogma out of the way is the first step in understanding the historical trajectory of war. — Steven Pinker

anxiety due to environmental stress is a major cause of myopia. Gottlieb — Jacob Liberman

Human myopia cannot be overcome simply by well-meaning attempts to build [climate] models that purport to peer decades and centuries ahead. Action taken now, in anticipation of supposed long run trends, may concentrate on the wrong issues and make matters worse rather than better. — Colin Robinson

Most of us suffer from a kind of myopia. We see only the things that fit in with our beliefs about the world. — T. J. MacGregor

The presence of some serious budgetary myopia is obvious here, as the vast majority of money is spent on studying diseases and virtually none is spent on understanding why healthy people are healthy in the first place. — Richard Matthews

The human race is all the same when it comes to romantic relations,' said the Major. 'A startling absence of impulse control combined with complete myopia. — Helen Simonson

Myopia, in more than ninety-five percent of cases, begins between five and ten years of age. It increases largely because the myopic eye is given a minus lens. — Anders Fogh Rasmussen

From our myopia arose our dystopia. — Anthony Marais

Americans suffer from mono-lingual myopia - a disease of the tongue that affects the vision. — Tom Brewster

The second illusion is historical myopia: the closer an era is to our vantage point in the present, the more details we can make out. Historical myopia can afflict both common sense and professional history. The cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have shown that people intuitively estimate relative frequency using a shortcut called the availability heuristic: the easier it is to recall examples of an event, the more probable people think it is.10 People, for example, overestimate the likelihoods of the kinds of accidents that make headlines, such as plane crashes, shark attacks, and terrorist bombings, and they underestimate those that pile up unremarked, like electrocutions, falls, and drownings. — Steven Pinker

It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately myopic and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order not to see macrosopically. — Marilyn Frye

Arthritis vanishes, myopia gets better, heart illness decreases, asthma disappears, stomachs function properly and the whole catalogue of illnesses goes away and stays away. — L. Ron Hubbard

There will be no room, here, for the smug myopia which views American civilization as the final solution to all world problems; which recommends our institutions for universal adoption and turns away with contempt from the serious study of the institutions of peoples whose civilizations may seem to us to be materially less advanced. — George F. Kennan

That thing over there was more there than it's there!
Yes, sometimes I cry about the perfect body that doesn't exist.
But the perfect body is the bodiest body there can be,
And the rest are the dreams men have,
The myopia of someone who doesn't look very much, — Alberto Caeiro

Prayer helps correct myopia, calling to mind a perspective I daily forget. I keep reversing roles, thinking of ways in which God should serve me, rather than vice versa. As God fiercely reminded Job, the Lord of the universe has many things to manage, and in the midst of my self-pity I would do well to contemplate for a moment God's own point of view. — Philip Yancey

Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank. — Remy De Gourmont

Business is all about focus. But with focus comes myopia and to conquer that, I come in to shake things up. To be invited as a keynote speaker is to have a license to interfere and interrupt. — Magnus

Confident that cast-iron walls separate our nature and situation from theirs, comfortable in the well-broken-in saddle of our high horse, we have exchanged our capacity to be tolerant for detachment and derision.
It is the tragedian's task, then, to force us to confront an almost unbearable truth: every folly or myopia of which any human being in history has been guilty may be traced back to some aspect of our collective nature. Because we each bear within ourselves the whole of the human condition, in its worst and best aspects, any one of us might be capable of doing anything at all, or nothing, under the right - or rather the most horribly wrong - conditions. — Alain De Botton

GUIL: It [Hamlet's madness] really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother, that sort of thing; intimations of suicide, forgoing of exercise, loss of mirth, hints of claustrophobia not to say delusions of imprisonment; invocations of camels, chameleons, capons, whales, weasels, hawks, handsaws
riddles, quibbles and evasions; amnesia, paranoia, myopia; day-dreaming, hallucinations; stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover, and appearing hatless in public
knock-kneed, droop-stockinged and sighing like a love-sick schoolboy, which at his age is coming on a bit strong.
ROS: And talking to himself.
GUIL: And talking to himself. — Tom Stoppard

At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant. — Aldo Leopold

She has four sons," Nurse Purvis leads me on, "all with a London post code, but they never visit. You'd think old age was a criminal offense, not a destination we're all heading to." I consider airing my theory that our culture's coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and Sansara, that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to us that our willful myopia about death is exactly that. — David Mitchell

The hipster narrative about gentrification isn't necessarily inaccurate - young people are indeed moving to cities and opening craft breweries and wearing tight clothing - but it is misleading in its myopia. Someone who learned about gentrification solely through newspaper articles might come away believing that gentrification is just the culmination of several hundred thousand people's individual wills to open coffee shops and cute boutiques, grow mustaches and buy records. But those are the signs of gentrification, not its causes. As — Peter Moskowitz

But I must hope that books possess a life of a more varied kind than their authors' myopia concedes to them. A book is a kind of of machine which the reader can freely use as a generator of intellectual stimulation. It is enough that the book should be truly a machine for thinking, that it should generate a variety of possible conclusions without its author's ordaining and limiting them in advance. — Umberto Eco

As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. — Hunter S. Thompson

All he really knew was that if he stayed here he would soon be the property of things that buzzed and snorted and hissed, that gave off fumes or stenches. In six months, he would be the owner of a large pink, trained ulcer, a blood pressure of algebraic dimensions, a myopia this side of blindness, and nightmares as deep as oceans and infested with improbable lengths of dream intestines through which he must violently force his way each night. — Ray Bradbury

the wages of empire is myopia — Natasha Trethewey

It's like looking through a microscope your whole life," he (Justin) said. "You miss the whole picture. Sometimes you need to get lost in order to discover anything. — Katie Kacvinsky

He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him. — George Eliot

He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of green-tinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath. — Salman Rushdie

I'm not actually sure that actors or artists should be allowed to have a family, because the focus you need, the egotism, the myopia, is just taking away from the relationship. — John Rhys-Davies

The intricate and different life cycles of both male and female root-heads, and the great behavioral sophistication shown by the female in reconfiguring a host crab as a support system, all underscore the myopia of our conventional wisdom in regarding rhizocephalans as degenerate parasites because the adult anatomy of internal roots and external sac seem so simple. — Stephen Jay Gould

Arthur Schlesinger admits that JFK "succumbed to the fake omniscience of insiders". Prolonged immersion in the self-contained, self-justifying world of clandestinity and deception erodes the reality principle. — Garry Wills

This gorgeous financial myopia was common in the Valley, and one of the chief sources of its success. — Michael Lewis

We cannot let colorblindness become myopia which masks the reality that many "created equal" have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens. — William J. Brennan