On His Blindness Quotes & Sayings

My weakness consists in not having a discriminating eye for the incidental
for the externals,
no eye for the hod of the rag-picker or the fine linen of the next mean. Next man
that's it. I have met so many men." he pursued, with momentary sadness
"met them too with a certain, certain impact, let us say; like this fellow, for instance
and in each case all I could see was merely a human being. A confounded democratic quality of vision which may be better than total blindness, but has been of no advantage to me
I can assure you. Men expect one to take into account their fine linen. But I never could get up any enthusiasm about these things. Oh! It's a failing; and then comes a soft evening; a lot of men too indolent for whist
and a story ... " [p.44] — Joseph Conrad

In every war, there are always elements of blindness. — Shimon Peres

So what does all this mean if you desperately want to persuade someone who doesn't want to be persuaded?

The first step is to appreciate that your opponent's opinion is likely based less on fact and logic than on ideology and herd thinking. If you were to suggest this to his face, he would of course deny it. He is operating from a set of biases he cannot even see. As the behavioral sage Daniel Kahneman has written: "We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness." Few of us are immune to this blind spot. That goes for you, and that goes for the two of us as well. And so, as the basketball legend-cum-philosopher Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once put it, "It's easier to jump out of a plane - hopefully with a parachute - than it is to change your mind about an opinion. — Steven D. Levitt

You lie to her, you lie to me, you lie to yourself. Blind girl blind you. — Daniel Wallace

A humble god! You might as well have a toothless wolf! The gods are the gods, ruling thunder and commanding storms, they are the lords of night and day, of fire and ice, the givers of disaster and of triumph. To this day I do not understand why folk become Christians unless it's simply that the other gods enjoy a joke. I have often suspected that Loki, the trickster god, invented Christianity because it has his wicked stench all over it. I can imagine the gods sitting in Asgard one night, all of them bored and probably drunk, and Loki amuses them with a typical piece of his nonsense, "Let's invent a carpenter," he suggests, "and tell the fools that he was the son of the only god, that he died and came back to life, that he cured blindness with lumps of clay, and that he walked on water!" Who would believe that nonsense? But the trouble with Loki is that he always takes his jests too far. — Bernard Cornwell

Having Simultanagnosia (object blindness), Prosopagnosia (face blindness) and Semantic Agnosia (meaning blindness) goes in my favour with regards to abstract art living in world full of fragmented pieces when I draw it is in real time no visual memory means no "pre-formatted" picture in my mind so I go where my hand takes it's like journey that is happening in the moment, hence why I drew these without my lenses on. When I was younger I would draw pictures by "route" which made it a appear that I had a visual memory (cobbling together things out of context and making a contextual image) — Paul Isaacs

You deal with me very frankly, and I thank you for it,' said I. 'I will try on my side to be no less honest. I believe these deep duties may lie upon your lordship; I believe you may have laid them on your conscience when you took the oaths of the high office which you hold. But for me, who am just a plain man
or scarce a man yet
the plain duties must suffice. I can think but of two things, of a poor soul in the immediate and unjust danger of a shameful death, and of the cries and tears of his wife that still tingle in my head. I cannot see beyond, my lord. It's the way I am made. If the country has to fall, it has to fall. And I pray God, if this is wilful blindness, that He may enlighten me before too late. — Robert Louis Stevenson

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion. — Thomas Carlyle

Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden exchange meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty. — Samuel Johnson

Vikram hated fear. He hated how it fed on him and stripped away his comfortable blindness. Fear forced him to hold up the contents of his heart to the light. — Roshani Chokshi

Only now, in rhythmic waves, was she struck by her stupidity, her blindness, her estheronautiness, and, above all, her longing, the insult of the power of her longing, and she knew very well that is was these shortcomings that had made her so eager to interweave in his story the threads of her secret dreams of candor and of painful, purifying honesty; of a generous togetherness in which everything was possible. For a moment, with all that had been spun and stabbed and defiled within her, her face took on the expression of a frightened, abandoned girl who lunges out to bite, who lives unimaginably close to the skin's surface, ready to be drawn out like a final plan of retreat. — David Grossman

Strike experienced a moment of pure clarity: he would never make it out of here, would never rise above his current position as Rodney's lieutenant, because all the intelligence and prudence and vision came to nothing if it wasn't tempered and supported by a certain blindness, an oblivious animal will that Rodney had, that he, Strike, did not have.
Rodney would survive all this not because of his guts or his brains, but because he understood that there was no real life out here on the street, no real lives other than his own, and that what really mattered was coming first in all things, in all ways and at all costs. — Richard Price

Whosoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. Genesis, 9:6 Verily, great self-righteousness and great blindness are needed to call the gore pouring from the scaffold justice. Vysogota of Corvo CHAPTER FIVE 'What seeks the Witcher on my territory? — Andrzej Sapkowski

She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said "Exactly" to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty, - how could he affect her as a lover? The — George Eliot

I had to learn the hard way. There was a blindness, without any education or will or drive. Everything I started in the beginning from skate shops to record labels to a million and one side hustles that I went in without knowing how I was going to do it, a lot of those ventures just went out of business. — Rob Dyrdek

We'd all lost ourselves and found something far more significant together. We reached with gaping wounds for a healing we desired so badly, like a blind man picturing the world around him - the lively children skipping rope, green grass, blue sky. It's like that man standing in his vision, rising from the park bench, arms outstretched, taking the first steps into a world he only hopes exists. — Christopher Hawke

Not the zeal alone of those who seek Him proves God, but the blindness of those who seek Him not. — Blaise Pascal

The reason con artists get away with what they get away with is, their victims are ashamed of their own blindness and their own gullibility, and they tend to just quietly go away. — Walter Kirn

Prejudice creates blindness; it is too busy hating to think. No matter how justified it might feel, prejudice will shackle you." "But — Jonathan Renshaw

The rebel, dismissed as impractical and zealous, is chronically misunderstood. Those cursed with timidity, fear, or blindness and those who are slaves to opportunism call for moderation and patience. They distort the language of religion, spirituality, compromise, generosity, and compassion to justify cooperation with systems of power that are bent on our destruction. The rebel is deaf to these critiques. The rebel hears only his or her inner voice, which demands steadfast defiance. Self-promotion, positions of influence, the adulation of the public, and the awards and prominent positions that come with bowing before authority mean nothing to the rebel, who understands that virtue is not rewarded. The rebel expects nothing and gets nothing. But for the rebel, to refuse to struggle, to refuse to rebel, is to commit spiritual and moral suicide. — Chris Hedges

Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness, Heav'n bestows on thee. — Alexander Pope

Can you even cry, anyway? With your eyes and all." Josh asks, fingers tapping a rhythm on the cushion behind Caid's right shoulder.
Caid swats his arm away. Says, "How is someone paying you to teach children? Of course I can fucking cry; it's not my tear ducts that are broken."
"I teach history, not the anatomy of eyeballs, shithead."
"How old are you?" Caid scoffs, feeling frustrated and exposed. He hates talking about his blindness. Hates it almost more than actually being blind. — Seventhswan

Blindness to larger contexts is a constitutional defect of human thinking imposed by the painful necessity of being able to concentrate on only one thing at a time. We forget as we virtuously concentrate on that one thing that hundreds of other things are going on at the same time and on every side of us, things that are just as important as the object of our study and that are all interconnected in ways that we cannot even guess. Sad to say, our picture of the world to the degree to which it has that neatness, precision, and finality so coveted by scholarship is a false one.
I once studied with a famous professor who declared that he deliberately avoided the study of any literature east of Greece lest the new vision destroy the architectonic perfection of his own celebrated construction of the Greek mind. His picture of that mind was immensely impressive but, I strongly suspect, completely misleading. — Hugh Nibley

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it ... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. — C.S. Lewis

Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said "Exactly" to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty,
how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it. — George Eliot

Fortune has been considered the guardian divinity of fools; and, on this score, she has been accused of blindness; but it should rather be adduced as a proof of her sagacity, when she helps those who cannot help themselves. — Charles Caleb Colton

Tilting her face back, he looked into her eyes. They were unfocused, unable to settle on his face. And the same terrifying feeling stole over him once again. An acute fear - a final, painful realization - that her world was one of utter blackness. At last he realized the magnitude
of her blindness. He couldn't imagine never seeing her again.
It was like a death, the inevitable conclusion when someone was gone. Why it should hit him now, after all these years, he could not fathom, but it was there, and finally he understood her private hell. He'd told her he would die without sight. Selfish, arrogant bastard, concerned
with his own needs, his own perversions to watch
himself pleasure her, to study her as she accepted him, to watch their bodies joined. How carelessly he had said that, not thinking of Elizabeth and what she would die for. What she wanted in this life. — Charlotte Featherstone

To cheapen the lives of any group of men, cheapens the lives of all men, even our own. This is a law of human psychology, or human nature. And it will not be repealed by our wishes, nor will it be merciful to our blindness. — William Pickens

I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of 'The Train Driver' because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant. — Athol Fugard

My soul is full of whispered song,-My blindness is my sight;The shadows that I feared so longAre full of life and light. — Alice Cary

Doth God exact day-labor, light denied,'
I fondly ask; but patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, 'God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best, his state
Is kingly. Thousands at His bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.'
~Sonnet 19: On His Blindness (1655)~ — John Milton

Serra was a mix of light and darkness; he was a man of great vision and great blindness, of immense zeal and immense stubbornness. In his own mind, his goals justified his treatment of the Indians, whom he loved as the children he did not have and whom he disciplined with the same ardor with which he disciplined himself. His vision, like that of many of his eighteenth century contemporaries, demanded intolerance against those with different ideas about this world and the next. These qualities do not make him an angel or a devil; they simply make him a man of his time and place. His time and place were, like ours, far from perfect."26 — Christian Clifford

A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it. — Stephen King

Since we nowadays think that all a man needs for acquisition of truth is to exert his brain more or less vigorously, and since we consider an ascetic approach to knowledge hardly sensible, we have lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity. Thomas says that unchastity's first-born daughter is blindness of the spirit. Only he who wants nothing for himself, who not subjectively 'interested,' can know the truth. On the other hand, an impure, selfishly corrupted will-to-pleasure destroys both resoluteness of spirit and the ability of the psyche to listen in silent attention to the language of reality. — Josef Pieper

Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud - that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee - that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling - that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others — Ayn Rand

Dwight Langley, the painter, is the pure exponent of the evil the play is attacking; he is, in effect, the spokesman for Platonism, who explicitly preaches that beauty is unreachable in this world and perfection unattainable. Since he insists that ideals are impossible on earth, he cannot, logically enough, believe in the reality of any ideal, even when it actually confronts him. Thus, although he knows every facet of Kay Gonda's face, he (alone among the characters) does not recognize her when she appears in his life. This philosophically induced blindness, which motivates his betrayal of her, is a particularly brilliant concretization of the play's theme, and makes a dramatic Act I curtain. — Ayn Rand

The capacity to see and - equally so - blindness are not divisible. The critical faculty of the human mind is one: To believe one can be seeing internally but blind as far as the outside world is concerned is like saying that the light of a candle gives light only in one direction and not in all. The light of the candle is reason's capacity for critical, penetrating, uncovering thought. — Erich Fromm

Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think - not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of
default on existence and you pass the deficit to some moral man, expecting him to sacrifice his good for the sake of letting you survive by your evil.

Notes From: Rand, Ayn. "Atlas Shrugged." iBooks. — Rand Ayn

Goddamn himself for letting his independence slip away from him. He didn't even know how it had happened, how he had lost the ability to function on his own, or what the hell he was going to do about it now. — Kimberly Gardner

I am not at all impressed ... at how far man's wisdom has managed to lead him; besides, it is not very great. What does surprise me, on the other hand, is how high their folly, their downright stupidity even, not to say their complete and utter blindness, has managed to raise them. Other things being equal, I prefer to follow the folly of man, for that has brought him farther than his wisdom. — Halldor Laxness

The pain he feels in his own gut is either something to do with the caffeine, or the stress of realizing that if it's not snipers or blindness stealing your children, it's cancer coming to snipe your wife, and there's not a fucking thing a guy can do about any of it except to drop to his knees and pray, to pretend like someone or something that gives a shit is on teh other end of the line, to pretend anything, like you did when you were a kid until the pretending seems real, because without that all you've got for comfort is what's in front of your face ... — Scott Wrobel

After Sara's accident, so many well-intentioned people had offered her words of hope - that God would heal her, that she would see again - as if that was a given. It was the same hope people had offered Marilyn all those years ago. Story upon story of women who had struggled through infertility and ended up with a child on the other side.
'God is good. It'll happen,' they had told her.
As if God's goodness depended upon whether or not He answered prayers the way people wanted Him to answer. The hard truth was the sometimes He didn't. He hadn't rescued Marilyn from her infertility, and He hadn't rescued Sara from her blindness. But that didn't negate His goodness. It just meant that He had different plans. — Katie Ganshert

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act ... What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror. — Ernest Becker

Across the street at the New Orleans headquarters of the Lighthouse for the Blind - a two-story building attached to a four-story stucco lighthouse - another Christmas party was under way, and Wright watched as the sightless guests arrived. Then, before his eyes, a curious scene unfolded. As they were greeted by their hosts, the blind whites were escorted to a large room at the front of the house, whereas the blind Negroes were taken to the rear, where they stayed. Separated. Transfixed, Wright had to look twice before it dawned on him: 'They couldn't see to segregate themselves — Gilbert King

Why am I so interested in politics? But if I were to answer you very simply, I would say this: why shouldn't I be interested? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence, that is to say the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms and the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct. The essence of our life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves.
So I can't answer the question of why I should be interested; I could only answer it by asking why shouldn't I be interested? — Michel Foucault

I had thought, in my blindness, that the great things were the easiest to do, but now I see that drudgery is an inseparable part of everything worth while, and the more worth while it is, the more drudgery is involved. — Myrtle Reed

The fear of blindness created a moment's vacuum, serving as a relaxant for my exhausted and overheated brain. — Kenzaburo Oe

A writer is a genius not when critics say so, but when her or his book pierces your heart and rips off your blindness with its brilliance. — Ksenia Anske

God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You! — Thomas Merton

When you have once gained sight, it is impossible to feign blindness. — Svetlana Alliluyeva

Ignorance is the worst plague of all, a form of blindness that destroys the hearts of the people who hide behind it. — David Estes

The all-glorious Christ is both the means and the goal of our salvation from blindness. — John Piper

Leroy's reasoning is dry as a razor, and Chantal agrees: love as an exaltation of two individuals, love as fidelity, passionate attachment to a single person - no, that doesn't exist. And if it does exist, it is only as self-punishment, willful blindness, escape into a monastery. She tells herself that even if it does exist, love ought not to exist, and the idea does not maker her bitter, on the contrary, it produces a bliss that spreads throughout her body. She thinks of the metaphor of the rose that moves through all men and tells herself that she has been living locked away by love and now she is ready to obey the myth of the rose and merge with its giddy fragrance. — Milan Kundera

When you are the problem, it's hard to see it. — Marty Rubin

It makes me sick,the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England. — John Fowles

Up the stairs I found an imposing headquarters, decorated with the portraits and busts of solemn, whiskered old darlings who, no doubt, bled their customers with leeches and passed on the information to alarmed small boys that self-abuse leads to blindness. — John Mortimer

Neither blindness nor ignorance corrupts people and governments. They soon realize where the path they have taken is leading them. But there is an impulse within them, favored by their natures and reinforced by their habits, which they do not resist; it continues to propel them forward as long as they have a remnant of strength. He who overcomes himself is divine. Most see their ruin before their eyes; but they go on into it.1 Leopold von Ranke — Joachim Fest

When blindness and boldness, ignorance and arrogance, weakness and willfulness, meet together in men, it renders them odious to God, burdensome in society, dangerous in their counsels, disturbers of better purposes, intractable and incapable of better direction, miserable in the issue. Where Christ shows his gracious power in weakness, he does it by letting men understand themselves so far as to breed humility, and magnify God's love to such as they are. — Richard Sibbes

It hardly needs saying that such mutualistic communities will also be plagued by conflict. Conflict is at the very heart of life, resulting not simply from the malevolence of others in the struggle for place or portion, but also from the fact that men of the best will in the world seem to suffer incurably, so far as one can tell, from what William Jame called "a certain blindness" in perceiving the vitalities of others. — Benjamin Nelson

Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

Infidelity is one of those coinages,-a mass of base money that won't pass current with any heart that loves truly, or any head that thinks correctly. And infidels are poor sad creatures; they carry about them a load of dejection and desolation, not the less heavy that it is invisible. It is the fearful blindness of the soul. — Thomas Chalmers

If anyone is going to see the gospel as true and good, satanic blindness and natural deadness must be overcome by the power of God. This is why the Bible says that even though the gospel foolishness to many, yet 'to those who are called ... Christ [is] the power of God and the wisdom of God' (1 Corinthians 1:24). The 'calling' is the merciful act of God to remove natural deadness and satanic blindness, so that we see Christ as true and good. The merciful act is itself a blood-bought gift of Christ. Look to him, and pray that God would enable you to see and embrace the gospel of Christ. — John Piper

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism. — Aldous Huxley

( ... ) you have grown beyond supposing such actions to be either good or bad, and therefore it will be so much the easier to be tolerant of another's blindness. — Marcus Aurelius

I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively - or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show - or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone's heart - only by someone's head. — Ayn Rand

Love was a form of blindness that closed the eyes to the most glaring faults. — Alexander McCall Smith

We do not know what things look like, as you say," the beast said. "We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing, this seeing. — Madeleine L'Engle

How often have our own tears blinded us to the tears of others. — Marty Rubin

There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate. It's not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another. — Alexander Theroux

Running at night used to frighten me. Part of it was simply safety, the question of whether level ground would truly appear under each tentative footstep, and whether the temporary but complete blindness suffered while running toward headlights was, in fact, concealing death. — Don Kardong

Political correctness is a poison to our security and defenses. It imposes a willful blindness, both at the macro level when unwilling to engage with radical Islamism or whatever you want to call it - if you're not willing to call it what it is - and at the micro level, at the street level. — Pete Hegseth

Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality. — Sheri S. Tepper

Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed the victim. It has been abetted in its blindness by theories, still in keeping with the pedagogical principles of our great- grandparents, according to which children are viewed as crafty creatures, dominated by wicked drives, who invent stories and attack their innocent parents or desire them sexually. In reality, children tend to blame themselves for their parents' cruelty and to absolve the parents, whom they invariably love, of all responsibility. — Alice Miller

What dreams would he have, not seeing. Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born that way? — James Joyce

Is it not a strange blindness on our part to teach publicly the techniques of warfare and to reward with medals those who prove to be the most adroit killers? — Marquis De Sade

We all wanted this because let's face it, it's so inspiring and such a relief when people find a way to bear the unbearable, when you can organize things in such a way that a tiny miracle appears to have taken place and that love has once again turn out to be bigger than fear and death and blindness. — Anne Lamott

Sin is to a nature what blindness is to an eye. The blindness is an evil or defect which is a witness to the fact that the eye was created to see the light and, hence, the very lack of sight is the proof that the eye was meant ... to be the one particularly capable of seeing the light. Were it not for this capacity, there would be no reason to think of blindness as a misfortune. — Augustine Of Hippo

Evil denotes the lack of good. Not every absence of good is an evil, for absence may be taken either in a purely negative or in aprivative sense. Mere negation does not display the character of evil, otherwise nonexistents would be evil and moreover, a thing would be evil for not possessing the goodness of something else, which would mean that man is bad for not having the strength of a lion or the speed of a wild goat. But what is evil is privation; in this sense blindness means the privation of sight. — Thomas Aquinas

Learning slowly to not be so reactionary while inserting verbal gratitude into stressful situations is almost like being healed of mental blindness. — Ann Voskamp

We are only chance visitants to this jungle of blind mutations. The natural world existed when we did not, and it will continue to exist long after we are gone. The supernatural crept into life only when the door of consciousness was opened in our heads. The moment we stepped through that door, we walked out on nature. Say what we will about it and deny it till we die
we are blighted by our knowing what is too much to know and too secret to tell one another if we are to stride along our streets, work at our jobs, and sleep in our beds. It is the knowledge of a race of beings that is only passing through this shoddy cosmos. — Thomas Ligotti