Plainly See Quotes & Sayings

Big Z, little Z, what begins with Z? I do.
I'm a zizzer zazzer zuzz, as you can plainly see. — Dr. Seuss

He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself [ ... ]. — Kate Chopin

There were four of them, Catelyn saw. An old man in the black of the Night's Watch, two servants ... and Tyrion Lannister, standing there small and bold as life. "My men will sleep in your stable, and as for myself, well, I do not require a large room, as you can plainly see." He flashed a mocking grin. "So long as the fire's warm and the straw reasonably free of fleas, I am a happy man. — George R R Martin

Behold, a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment. 2. And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. 3. And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the ears of them that hear shall hearken. 4. The heart also of the rash shall understand knowledge, and the tongue of the stammerers shall be ready to speak plainly. 5. The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful. — Anonymous

I go farther, and say, that it is plainly our duty to desire pastors and teachers to take the care of such congregations, and that God did raise up such in the church as we see it in the word. — John Nelson Darby

Plainly, she is quite besotted by him, ... a girl, a young girl, and she is falling in love for the first time in her life ... little Kitty Howard at a loss, stumbling in her speech, blushing like a rose, thinking of someone else and not herself is to see a girl become a woman. — Philippa Gregory

Only at the cross of Christ does man see fully what it is that separates him from God; yet it is here alone that he perceives that he is no longer separated from God. Nowehere else does the inviolable holiness of God, the impossibility of overlooking the guilt of man stand out more plainly; but nowhere else does the limitless mercy of God, which utterly transcends all human standards, stand out more clearly and plainly. — Emil Brunner

...The same folks who believe this fantasy also believe that the sole motivation for modern man's practice of science is to disprove their beliefs. How despicably arrogant of them to circumvent their burden of proof! It is plainly there for all to see that science wishes to discover and prove the answers to the very same questions that religion claims to already have answers for, whether or not they disprove former assumptions by our ancestors. The religionists should be happy that that their claims might have the chance to be proven wrong, but instead they would rather fear them disproven. I don't know about you, but I smell a guilty conscience. If they were one-hundred percent certain that their claims were of truth, they wouldn't need "faith" in them, nor would they have to dread possible invalidation. — John M. Penkal

But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight - matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one's own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows. — Leon Wieseltier

By now, cooking has become so thickly crusted with pretension and gadgetry and marketing hype that the effort to reduce it to its most basic elements, to drive it into a corner and see it plainly, seemed like a good way to take hold of it again. — Michael Pollan

Nobody would ever believe that you had any interest in me." "I could make them believe. Not one in ten thousand would have figured out what you just did. Not one. I could make everyone believe in the woman who saw that - quiet, yes, and perhaps a little shy in company - " Minnie made a rude noise, but he waved her quiet. "You have steel for your backbone and a rare talent for seeing what is plainly in front of your face. I could make everyone see that." His eyes were intense, boring into her. There was no escaping him, it seemed. He dropped his voice. "I could make everyone see you. — Courtney Milan

No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recess of another mind. — Arnold Bennett

There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes. And the more nervous they are-the quicker to take fright-the more violent they pray that every storm will be ... Painters who have had this mentality, after repeated wounds and intimidations at the hands of the apparitions called human beings, have often come to believe in phantasms-they plainly saw monsters in broad daylight, in the midst of nature. And they did not fob people off with clowning; they did their best to depict these monsters just as they had appeared. Takeichi was right: they had dared to paint pictures of devils. — Osamu Dazai

You can always test the quality of religious teaching by the enthusiastic reception it receives from unsaved men. If the natural man receives it enthusiastically, it is not of the Spirit of God. Paul says plainly that the natural man cannot know spiritual things. To him, spiritual things are plain foolishness (see 1 Cor. 2:14). — A.W. Tozer

Jerusalem above is a city whose builder and maker is God. Every grace, yea, every degree of grace, is a stone in that building, the topstone whereof is laid in glory, where saints shall more plainly see, how God was not only Founder to begin, but Benefactor also to finish the same. The glory of the work shall not be crumbled and piece-mealed out, some to God and some to the creature, but all entirely paid in to God, and he acknowledged all in all. — William Gurnall

That many do not advance in the Christian progress because they stick in penances, and particular exercises, while they neglect the love of God, which is the end. That this appeared plainly by their works, and was the reason why we see so little solid virtue. — Brother Lawrence

Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden. — William S. Burroughs

I've seen most of what
there is to be afraid of in this world, and to tell you the truth,
the worst of them are the ones that make you afraid in the
light. The things that your eyes see plainly and can't forget
are worse than huddled black figures left to the imagination.
Imagination has a poor memory; it slinks away and goes
blurry. Eyes remember for much longer. — Kendare Blake

To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath.

We worry because we feel unsafe, and want to be safe. Yet it is perfectly useless to say that we should not want to be safe. Calling a desire bad names doesn't get rid of it. What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking it is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don't like it. In other words, if we can really understand what we are looking for - that safety is isolation, and what we do to ourselves when we look for it - we shall see that we do not want it at all. No one has to tell you that you should not hold your breath for ten minutes. You know that you can't do it, and that the attempt is most uncomfortable. — Alan W. Watts

It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business. — Mark Twain

If a woman's young and pretty, I think you can see her good looks all the better for her being plainly dressed. — George Eliot

Senor Sancho Panza must know that we too have enchanters here that are well disposed to us, and tell us what goes on in the world, plainly and distinctly, without subterfuge or deception; and believe me, Sancho, that agile country lass was and is Dulcinea del Toboso, who is as much enchanted as the mother that bore her; and when we least expect it, we shall see her in her own proper form, and then Sancho will be disabused of the error he is under at present. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

And you yourself always be seated at the middle fo the high table that your presence as lord or lady may appear openly to all, and that you may plainly see on either side all the service and all the faults. — Robert Grosseteste

As I see it, a lukewarm Christian is an oxymoron; there is no such thing. To put it plainly, churchgoers who are 'lukewarm' are not Christians. We will not see them in heaven. — Francis Chan

Love is a quicksilver word; though you see plainly where it is, you have only to put your finger on it to find that it is not there but someplace else. — Morton Hunt

You're pretty sharp, Clive. Do you believe in God?"
Clive smiled. "I don't know, should I?"
Actually, approaching the matter from a purely logical perspective, yes. All the evidence points to the existence of a creator. The single greatest body of evidence is the dismal failure of man's desperate attempts to come up with a reasonable alternative, beginning with evolution. I've always looked at the universe and seen a creator as plainly as most people who look at the ocean see water. — Ted Dekker

But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice ... I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. — Charles Darwin

And when Mrs. Wiggins turned, just before passing out of sight, and smiled at her, with a smile that was so broad on her big face that you could see it plainly even at that distance, Mrs. Margarine took out her handkerchief and waved it. Like — Walter R. Brooks

Daniel was slow to take up the cheer. But when he did, he meant it. This was politics. It was ugly, it was irrational, but it was preferable to war. Roger was being cheered because he had won. What did it mean to win? It meant being cheered. So Daniel huzzahed, as lustily as his dry pipes and creaky ribs would permit, and was astounded to see the way people came a-running: not only the Quality from their town-houses, but hooligans and Vagabonds from bonfire-strewn fields to the north, to throng around Roger and cheer him. Not because they agreed with his positions, or even knew who he was, but because he was plainly enough the man of the hour. — Neal Stephenson

I was breaking down, wanting to fade away and cry, yet I feared ever being invisible again. My head lowered to conceal my humiliation behind a curtain of hair where I trembled as if sobbing.
"Hey, Gwen, it's okay. It's okay. Calm down."
I yearned to feel Daniel's soft touch meet my temple and then trace along my ear, brushing back the hairs from my face. What I wanted was the comfort his caress always afforded me. He moved as if he would grant my wish, realizing at the last moment that neither of us possessed the power to touch the other.
"Your hair, Gwen."
I refused to do what he wanted. I didn't care for him to see the shame plainly visible in my features. But the next thing I knew, his blue eyes were staring up at me from the ground, a glare reflecting off his glasses. The guy had dropped his books to fall over for a clear view of my face. His desperation made me laugh.
"It's going to be okay, Gwen, I promise."
- from "Phantom's Veil — Richelle E. Goodrich

That evening was the evening of the full moon. The garden was an enchanted place where all the flowers seemed white. The lilies, the daphnes, the orange-blossom, the white stocks, the white pinks, the white roses - you could see these as plainly as in the daytime; but the coloured flowers existed only as fragrance. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

I keep a mountain anchored off eastward a little way, which I ascend in my dreams both awake and asleep. Its broad base spreads over a village or two, which does not know it; neither does it know them, nor do I when I ascend it. I can see its general outline as plainly now in my mind as that of Wachusett. I do not invent in the least, but state exactly what I see. I find that I go up it when I am light-footed and earnest. It ever smokes like an altar with its sacrifice. I am not aware that a single villager frequents it or knows of it. I keep this mountain to ride instead of a horse. — Henry David Thoreau

We are out in the middle of nowhere, as we can see - as you can plainly see. — Kurt Meyer

See we not plainly that obedience of creatures unto the law of nature is the stay of the whole world? — Richard Hooker

After the first shock of recognition - a sudden sense of "this is what I'm going to write" - the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in the mind, not on paper. I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the task for me. — Vladimir Nabokov

I am more optimistic though, that this court will eventually conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that is - and the death penalty - must be abandoned altogether. I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will arrive. — Harry A. Blackmun

I was always amazed at Cambridge how quickly people appeared to take offence at everything I said, but now I see plainly that it was not my words they hated - it was this fairy face. The dark alchemy of this face turns all my gentle human emotions into fierce fairy vices. Inside I am all despair, but this face shows only fairy scorn. My remorse becomes fairy fury and my pensiveness is turned to fairy cunning. — Susanna Clarke

Bonjour, Monsieur Fraser. She inclined her veil gracefully, more to hide the broad smile on her face than in greeting, I thought. I see you have made the acquaintance of Bouton. Are you perhaps in search of your wife?
This seeming to be my cue, I sidled out of the office door behind her. My devoted spouse glanced from Bouton to the office door, plainly drawing conclusions.
And just how long have ye been standin' there,Sassenach? he asked dryly. Long enough, I said, with the smug self-assurance of one in Bouton's good books. — Diana Gabaldon

I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body: they transmit movement to it. — Henri Bergson

I can understand how evolution says, "don't believe in God", but I've never had this problem. I've always loved His creation. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean any_thing to some people, and I just don't get that! After all, if you just read the Bible plainly, it tells you everything. From Creation, to the Flood, to Jesus. I can't see how you can come to the conclusion, there is no God. — Betty Cuthbert

Although we very clearly see the sun, we ought not therefore to determine that it is only of the size which our sense of sight presents; and we may very distinctly imagine the head of a lion joined to the body of a goat, without being therefore shut up to the conclusion that a chimaera exists; for it is not a dictate of reason that what we thus see or imagine is in reality existent; but it plainly tells us that all our ideas or notions contain in them some truth. — Rene Descartes

Pretend you're me, she says. I can barely see her over the frothy mound.
And it happens just like that.
A feeling of sinking, a falling deep inside.
And I'm her.
And this is my house, and Matt French is my husband, tallying columns all day, working late into the night for me, for me.
And here I am, my tight, my perfect body, my pretty, perfect face, and nothing could ever be wrong with me, or my life, not even the sorrow that is plainly
right there in the center of it. Oh, Colette, it's right there in the center of you, and some kind of despair too. Colette
that silk sucking into my mouth, the weight of it now, and I can't catch my breath, my breath. — Megan Abbott

The feeble mind of man did not presume to resist the clear evidence of truth, but yielded its infirmity to wholesome doctrines, as to a health-giving medicine, until it obtained from God, by its faith and piety, the grace needed to heal it, they who have just ideas, and express them in suitable language, would need to use no long discourse to refute the errors of empty conjecture. But this mental infirmity is now more prevalent and hurtful than ever, to such an extent that even after the truth has been as fully demonstrated as man can prove it to man, they hold for the very truth their own unreasonable fancies, either on account of their great blindness, which prevents them from seeing what is plainly set before them, or on account of their opinionative obstinacy, which prevents them from acknowledging the force of what they do see. — Augustine Of Hippo

It seemed there was no bottom to whatever abyss we bordered, and with each step, I vowed if I ever did meet the trail's end and was unmasked and untied, I'd never waste a chance again - if I was going to die, it would be when I could plainly see Kaden as I thrust a knife between his deceitful Vendan ribs. — Mary E. Pearson

First, that faith is not hope, not a mere expectation of future things, but a present receiving of that which is promised in a real and substantial way. It is accepting, not expecting. Secondly, that it is not sight, for it deals with things not seen. The region of the visible is not the realm of faith. When a thing is proved by demonstration, it is not a matter of faith, but of evidence. Faith asks no other evidences than God's Word and its own assurance. It is the evidence. It is not true to say that "seeing is believing." Faith believes where it cannot see; nay, believes what sight and evidence may even seem to contradict, if only God has said it. When God said to Abraham, "I have made thee a father of many nations," there was no sign of it; indeed, the evidence of sight plainly — A.B. Simpson

It was in the work that she came closest to finding herself, by which we don't mean gaining "self-knowledge" or understanding one's "true nature" but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how you fit in the wider ecology. — Chang-rae Lee

You might not see one in a hundred with
gentleman so plainly written as in Mr. Knightley. — Jane Austen

To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier. — Salman Rushdie

To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see. — Diane Setterfield

I wish they would use English instead of Greek words. When I want to know why a leaf is green, they tell me it is coloured by "chlorophyll," which at first sounds very instructive; but if they would only say plainly that a leaf is coloured green by a thing which is called "green leaf," we should see more precisely how far we had got. — John Ruskin

Rebecca held her head high and swanned across the hallway, but as she neared the footman, she could see quite plainly that his gaze was not where it should be. She stopped dead and slapped her hands over her bosom.
"Its too low, isn't it? I knew I shouldn't have listened to that maid. She might not mind her boobies hanging out for all to see, but i just can't-" Her brain suddenly caught up with her mouth. She removed her hands from her bosom and slapped them over her awful, awful, awful mouth. — Elizabeth Hoyt

It seems so impossible that someone could look at [Andy and Noah], see how plainly they care for each other, and find anything ugly or shameful or worthy of hatred in it, when all I see is something beautiful. — Hannah Harrington

I see the President almost every day. I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln's dark brown face with its deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed. — Walt Whitman

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. — Alice Walker

At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd — Walt Whitman

One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Not in the least," I said. "I understand everything you've said. But - oh, Simon, I feel so resentful! Why should father make things so difficult? Why can't he say what he means plainly?" "Because there's so much that just can't be said plainly. Try describing what beauty is - plainly - and you'll see what I mean." Then he said that art could state very little - that its whole business was to evoke responses. And that without innovations and experiments - such as father's - all art would stagnate. "That's why one ought not to let oneself resent them - though I believe it's a normal instinct, probably due to subconscious fear of what we don't understand. — Dodie Smith

That we need only to recognize GOD intimately present with us, to address ourselves to Him every moment, that we may beg His assistance for knowing His will in things doubtful, and for rightly performing those which we plainly see He requires of us, offering them to Him before we do them, and giving Him thanks when we have done. — Brother Lawrence

You think that way as you begin to get grayer and you see pretty plainly that the game is not going to end as you planned. — Loren Eiseley

There's something in your eyes that scares me,"
Max whispired, looking through the window.
Landon took her face into his hand and made her look into his eyes "What?" he asked. "What do you see?"
"Fear," she answered plainly. "I see fear — Shawn Kirsten Maravel

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid. — Livy

The things that your eyes see plainly and cant forget are worse than huddled black figures left to the imagination. — Kendare Blake

Witches see the truth plainly - even if their husbands are full of nonsense. — Deborah Harkness

Are you seeing a psychiatrist?' as a conversation opener would nowadays earn you a punch in the nose, but for fifty years it was a compliment. It meant, 'One can plainly see you are sensitive, intense, and interesting, and therefore neurotic.' Only the dullest of clods trudged around without a neurosis. — Barbara Holland

She was so beautiful, you see. Not in any two-dimensional sense: she wasn't young, she wasn't innocent, she didn't have that pristine symmetry so favored by ad-men and photographers. Her face was plainly that of a woman in her early forties: it had been used to laugh and cry, and usage leaves its marks. But she had a power to transform herself, in the subtlest way, making that face as various as the sky. — Clive Barker

We can see quite plainly that our present civilization is built on the exploitation of animals, just as past civilisations were built on the exploitation of slaves. — Donald Watson

I see all mythology as one tradition, a way of disseminating knowledge that must come to us in code so that we can live sanely with it, since some forms of knowledge are too dark, or too complex, to be plainly spoken. And so we have these weird (and also sometimes entertaining and surprising and heartening) tales that belong to all of us. — Helen Oyeyemi

And at the end of the evening he and Dym had made plans, airy ambitious plans, of all that they would do after the war. Euphemia had laughed at the planners. "What boundless energy you have, Jacob!" she had said.
Jacob had turned - Tony could see the dark, curly head and sparkling eyes quite plainly - and smiled at her. "Madam," he had said, "if I had a thousand lives, I could fill them all. — Constance Savery

How bitterly glad I am to see you. You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it won't be for long. What do you know about the sea? Nothing. What do I know about the sea? Nothing. Without a driver this bus is lost. Our lives are over. Come aboard if your destination is oblivion
It should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat, if you want. But it's a sad view. Oh enough of this disembling. Let me say plainly: I love you, I love you, I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. Not the spiders, please. — Yann Martel

The bells cease, and the power goes from me, and I descend again to the world of the living; and if in some foolish confiding moment I try to explain why I want to re-live those old days, to tear the Truth out of the past so that all men shall see plainly, perhaps someone will say to me, 'Oh, the War! A tragedy - best forgotten.' — Henry Williamson

I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of the miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention. — Marilynne Robinson

The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface.
[Alluding to Joseph Priestley's Observations on Air] — Edmund Burke

In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between their clinical and nonclinical uses. Public health advocates don't object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don't want to see the drugs lose their effectiveness because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn't be sick if not for the diet of grain we feed them. — Michael Pollan

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally Id see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I WOULD be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real. — Cheryl Strayed

Or was their guilt written plainly, and for all the world to see, across their face? Was it their face, in fact, for which they were guilty? — Julie Otsuka