Quotes & Sayings About Sight And Knowledge

How infinitely good that Providence is which has provided, in its government of mankind, such narrow bounds to his sight and knowledge of things; and though he walks in the midst of so many thousand dangers, the sight of which, if discovered to him, would distract his mind and sink his spirits, he is kept serene and calm by having the events of things hid from his eyes, and knowing nothing of the dangers which surround him! — Daniel Defoe

I call these lessons 'learned on the fly' because the knowledge gained from the experiences connected with them were very much akin to the spirit of the centerfielder in baseball running backward at full speed, looking towards the heavens, trying to not lose sight of the ball or fail to notice the sensation of gravel from the warning track under his cleats as he knowingly approaches the blindside impact of an outfield wall. His focused intention guides him into trying to make the catch that will save the game for his team, his city and the harmony of the moment, despite the foreboding threat of a pending collision. Decisions in these situations are made in an instant. One weighs the purpose of the game, the success of the catch and one's own safety of survival in a fleeting moment, and in all hopes one lives to tell about it in the glow of great success. — Michael Delaware

Education isn't what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes ... The power to learn is present in everyone's soul and ... the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body ... Then education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. it isn't the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education take for granted that sight is there but that it isn't turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately. — Plato

I love you. As the same value, as the same expression, with the same pride and the same meaning as I love my work, my mills, my Metal, my hours at a desk, at a furnace, in a laboratory, in an ore mine, as I love my ability to work, as I love the act of sight and knowledge, as I love the action of my mind when it solves a chemical equation or grasps a sunrise, as I love the things I've made and the things I've felt, as *my* product, as *my* choice, as a shape of my world, as my best mirror, as the wife I've never had, as that which makes all the rest of it possible: as my power to live. — Ayn Rand

The rishis of old attained the Knowledge of Brahman. One cannot have this so long as there is the slightest trace of worldliness. How hard the rishis laboured ! Early in the morning they would go away from the hermitage, and would spend the whole day in solitude, meditating on Brahman. At night they would return to the hermitage and eat a little fruit or roots. They kept their mind aloof from the objects of sight, hearing, touch, and other things of a worldly nature. Only thus did they realize Brahman as their own inner conciousness. — Ramakrishna

A man may read the figure on the dial, but he cannot tell how the day goes, unless the sun shines upon the dial: we may read the Bible over, but we can not learn the purpose, till the Spirit of God shines into our hearts. O implore this blessed Spirit! It is God's prerogative-royal to teach: "I am the Lord thy God, which teacheth thee to profit." Is. 48. 17. Ministers may tell us our lesson, God only can teach us; we have lost both our hearing and eye-sight, therefore are very unfit to learn. Ever since Eve listened to the serpent, we have been deaf; and since she looked on the tree of knowledge we have been blind; but when God comes to teach, he removes these impediments. — Thomas Watson

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. — David Foster Wallace

Pritkin, it's a hotel room, not a death trap!" A glance over his shoulder showed him impatient blue eyes under a fall of messy blond curls. "Anyway, you're here."
"I can't protect you from everything," he forced himself to say, because it was true. It was also frankly terrifying in a way that his own mortality was not. He'd never had children, but he sometimes wondered if this was how parents felt when catching sight of a fearless toddler confidently heading toward a busy street. Not that his charge was a child, as he was all too uncomfortably aware. But the knowledge of just how many potentially lethal pitfalls lay in her path sometimes caused him that same heart-clenching terror.
And the same overwhelming need to throw her over his lap and spank the living daylights out of her, he thought grimly, when she suddenly popped out of existence. "Cassie! — Karen Chance

Answer this to yourselves, & expel from among you those who pretend to despise the labours of Art & Science, which alone are the labours of the Gospel: Is not this plain & manifest to the thought? Can you think at all, & not pronounce heartily! That to Labour in Knowledge. is to Build up Jerusalem: and to Despise Knowledge, is to Despise Jerusalem & her Builders. And remember: He who despises & mocks a Mental Gift in another; calling it pride & selfishness & sin; mocks Jesus the giver of every Mental Gift. which always appear to the ignorance-loving Hypocrite, as Sins. but that which is a Sin in the sight of cruel Man. is not so in the sight of our kind God. — William Blake

Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. And we strain ourselves to see, see, see
everything, everything through the eye, inone mode of objective curiosity. — D.H. Lawrence

Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good. — Plato

Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary. — Henry David Thoreau

Knowledge is to the strong, and we are weak. Too much wisdom would perchance blind our imperfect sight, and too much strength would make us drunk, and overweight our feeble reason till it fell, and we were drowned in the depths of our own vanity. — H. Rider Haggard

Life is like a game of chess. To win you have to make a move. Knowing which move to make comes with IN-SIGHT and knowledge, and by learning the lessons that are acculated along the way. We become each and every piece within the game called life! — Alan Rufus

Sight is a slick and overbearing autocrat, trumpeting its prodigal knowledge and perceptions so forcefully that it drowns out the other, subtler senses. — Rosemary Mahoney

All men naturally desire knowledge. An indication of this is our esteem for the senses; for apart from their use we esteem them for their own sake, and most of all the sense of sight. Not only with a view to action, but even when no action is contemplated, we prefer sight, generally speaking, to all the other senses. The reason of this is that of all the senses sight best helps us to know things, and reveals many distinctions. — Aristotle.

The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either. — Roger Zelazny

She'd dreamed of him. Her imagination, unfettered in her sleep, had featured him. He'd been gloriously naked and her hands had explored the whole of him, delighted to discover that the handsome man was even more magnificent without clothes.
Drumvagen might be set into the Scottish wilderness, but what furnished her with a great deal of knowledge she otherwise might not have had. She listened to the maids discussing their love lives with a frankness they never would have had they known she was eavesdropping. Then, there was the sight of the handsome Scots lads bathing in the sea.
The books she read from Mairi's library had strengthened her imagination, adding details otherwise missing from her personal experience. — Karen Ranney

The soft throb and glow roused in my breast by the gilt letters of four or five different languages winking at me from scores of handsomely tooled bindings - the sight of so much knowledge so beautifully presented - swiftly flamed out. — Ross King

Nothing is stranger, more delicate, than the relationship between people who know each other only by sight - who encounter and observe each other daily, even hourly, and yet are compelled by the constraint of convention or by their own temperament to keep up the pretense of being indifferent strangers, neither greeting nor speaking to each other. Between them is uneasiness and overstimulated curiosity, the nervous excitement of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need to know and to communicate; and above all, too, a kind of strained respect. For man loves and respects his fellow man for as long as he is not yet in a position to evaluate him, and desire is born of defective knowledge. It — Thomas Mann

Yet how hard most people work for mere dust and ashes and care, taking no thought of growing in knowledge and grace, never having time to get in sight of their own ignorance. — John Muir

The legislator must be in advance of his age.
Across the mind of the statesman flash ever and anon the brilliant, though partial, intimations of future events ... Something which is more than fore-sight and less than prophetic knowledge marks the statesman a peculiar being among his contemporaries. — Woodrow Wilson

The consciousness of the seer, is a greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker. The perceptual power of the inner sight is greater and more direct than the perceptual power of thought: ... — Sri Aurobindo

Beyond this world is another world for us. This world and its delights cater to the animal within us. These pleasures all fill our animal nature, while our real self slowly dies. They say, "The human being is a rational animal," yet we consist of two things. Lusts and desires feed our animality in this material world. But as for our true essence, its food is knowledge, wisdom, and the sight of God. The animality within us flees away from God, while our spiritual self flees away from this world. — Jalaluddin Rumi

Understanding knowledge as an essential element of love is vital because we are bombarded daily with messages that tell us love is about mystery, about that which cannot be known. We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message is received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge. These messages are brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction. — Bell Hooks

Some have asked whether we shall know one another in heaven? Surely, our knowledge will not be diminished, but increased. The judgement of Luther and Anselm, and many other divines is, that we shall know one another; yea, the saints of all ages, whose faces we never saw; and, when we shall see the saints in glory without their infirmities of pride end passion, it will be a glorious sight. — Thomas Watson

Life itself is a moment like this, the soul beat down and held to knowledge: you keep on trudging upward, the goal shifts in and out of sight, always further away than you expected, and the work is hard and unremitting. And the questions are the same as always: What are you doing? Is it the right thing? Should you go back? - Nothing up here but the same answers, stripped bare of all complication: Just walk. Keep hiking. That's all you can do. That is your destiny. — Kim Stanley Robinson

But, if the knowledge of the occult powers of nature opens the spiritual sight of man, enlarges his intellectual faculties, and leads him unerringly to a profounder veneration for the Creator, on the other hand ignorance, dogmatic narrow-mindedness, and a childish fear of looking to the bottom of things, invariably leads to fetish-worship and superstition. — H. P. Blavatsky

All of us judge by sight and not by knowledge. — Euripides

Explorers depend on the North Star when there are no other landmarks in sight. The same relationship exists between you and your right life, the ultimate realization of your potential for happiness. I believe that a knowledge of that perfect life sits inside you just as the North Star sits in its unaltering spot. — Martha Beck

The first men to be created and formed were called the Sorcerer of Fatal Laughter, the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt, and the Black Sorcerer ... They were endowed with intelligence, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. When they looked, instantly they saw all that is around them, and they contemplated in turn the arc of heaven and the round face of the earth ... [Then the Creator said]: 'They know all ... what shall we do with them now? Let their sight reach only to that which is near; let them see only a little of the face of the earth! ... Are they not by nature simple creatures of our making? Must they also be gods? — Anonymous

For many ages it has been allowed by sensible men, Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuit prius in sensu: That is, There is nothing in the understanding which was not first perceived by some of the senses. All the knowledge which we naturally have is originally derived from our senses. And therefore those who want any sense cannot have the least knowledge or idea of the objects of that sense; as they that never had sight have not the least knowledge or conception of light or colours. — John Wesley

Is it possible that somewhere there are ships setting out? If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, traveling toward or away from him, steered by sailors armed with maps and knowledge of the stars, driven by need or perhaps simply by curiosity; whatever became of the countries on the other side? If nothing else, it's pleasant to consider the possibility. He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight. — Emily St. John Mandel

A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child subject still to her power but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. — Bertrand Russell

Tis the most certain sign, the world's accurst That the best things corrupted, are the worst; 'Twas the corrupted Light of knowledge, hurl'd Sin, Death, and Ignorance o'er all the world; That Sun like this (from which our sight we have) Gaz'd on too long, resumes the light he gave. — John Denham

My knowledge of trains - and love before first sight, love at negative-one sight - comes from Alfred Hitchcock. — Darin Strauss

I am as you see me. I am happy and able because I allow myself to be happy. I learned young that being active breeds more activity. That the gift of studying is knowledge. That seeing grants sight. That if you don't feel anger, you won't be angry. Sadness and frustration, even tragedy, are inevitable, but that doesn't mean that happiness isn't there for us, for all of us. My secret is that I choose to be the person that I want to be. That I don't believe in destiny or predetermination, but in choice, and that each of us chooses to be the person we are. Whatever you want to be you can be; whatever you want to do you can do; wherever you want to go you can go. The world, and the life ahead, is ours for the taking. The future is unwritten, and you can make it whatever you want it to be. — James Frey

Let it be a settled principle in our minds, in reading the Bible, that Christ is the central sun of the whole book. So long as we keep Him in view, we shall never greatly err in our search for spiritual knowledge. Once losing sight of Christ, we shall find the whole Bible dark and full of difficulty. — J.C. Ryle

But mark, madam, we live amongst riddles and mysteries
the most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which thequickest sight cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings amongst us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost every cranny of nature's works. — Laurence Sterne

And follow not that of which you have not the knowledge; surely the hearing and the sight and the heart, all of these, shall be questioned about that
Quran-ALISRA — Anonymous

The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial. — C. Wright Mills

Men seized of the urge to have a knowledge of God and to be pure in mind devote all their gathered energies to this one task. While they still live in the corruption of the flesh they give themselves to that service in which they will persevere when the corruption has been laid aside. And already they come in sight of what the Lord and Savior held out when He said, 'Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God' (Mt. 5:8). — John Cassian

Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any break of morality. — Ayn Rand

The refining influence is the study of art, which is the science of beauty; and I find that every man values every scrap of knowledge in art, every observation of his own in it, every hint he has caught from another. For the laws of beauty are the beauty of beauty, and give the mind the same or a higher joy than the sight of it gives the senses. The study of art is of high value to the growth of the intellect. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge. — William Hazlitt

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, 2for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. 3This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, 4who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 5For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man [1] Christ Jesus, 6who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. 7For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth. 8I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling; 9likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, 10but with what is — Anonymous

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know. — Michel Foucault

By stressing intrinsic value in thought. And it is true that when men have become engrossed in practical devices they are apt to narrow their field of vision and lose sight of the interconnection of the various branches of knowledge. More than that, as is now the case, they will even forget the larger principles they have applied, and on which their well-being depends. — Isabel Paterson

Intellect is the knowledge obtained by experience of names and forms; wisdom is the knowledge which manifests only from the inner being; to acquire intellect one must delve into studies, but to obtain wisdom, nothing but the flow of divine mercy is needed; it is as natural as the instinct of swimming to the fish, or of flying to the bird. Intellect is the sight which enables one to see through the external world, but the light of wisdom enables one to see through the external into the internal world. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

If men possessed wisdom, which stands in the same relation to the form of man as the sight to the eye, they would not cause any injury to themselves or to others; for the knowledge of truth removes hatred and quarrels, and prevents mutual injuries. — Maimonides

To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depths of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions. — John Ruskin

The Indwelling of Christ by faith ... is to have Jesus Christ continually in one's eye, a habitual sight of Him. I call it so because a man actually does not always think of Christ; but as a man does not look up to the sun continually, yet he sees the light of it ... . So you should carry along and bear along in your eye the sight and knowledge of Christ, so that at least a presence of Him accompanies you, which faith makes. - Thomas Goodwin, Works, 2:411 — Thomas Goodwin

Do not underestimate the human being, who sometimes appears so simple. Even with sight as sharp as an eagle, a mind as sharp as a razor, senses more powerful than gods, hearing that can catch the music and the lamentations of life, your knowledge of humanity will never be total. — Pramoedya Ananta Toer

I am not of the opinion that one can ever lack the power to express perfectly what one wants to write or say. Observations on the weakness of language, and comparisons between the limitations of words and the infinity of feelings, are quite fallacious. The infinite feeling continues to be as infinite in words as it was in the heart. What is clear within is bound to become so in words as well. This is why one need never worry about language, but at sight of words may often worry about oneself. After all, who knows within himself how things really are with him? This tempestuous or floundering or morasslike inner self is what we really are, but by the secret process by which words are forced out of us, our self-knowledge is brought to light, and though it may still be veiled, yet it is there before us, wonderful or terrible to behold. — Franz Kafka

At first sight it might be thought that knowledge might be defined as belief which is in agreement with the facts. The trouble is that no one knows what a belief is, no one knows what a fact is, and no one knows what sort of agreement between them would make a belief true. — Bertrand Russell

To be taught to read - what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak - but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think - nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true. — John Ruskin

But he could no longer disbelieve in the reality of love, since God Himself had loved his individual soul with divine love from all eternity. Gradually, as his soul was enriched with spiritual knowledge, he saw the whole world forming one vast symmetrical expression of God's power and love. Life became a divine gift for every moment and sensation of which, were it even the sight of a single leaf hanging on the twig of a tree, his soul should praise and thank the Giver. The world for all its solid substance and complexity no longer existed for his soul save as a theorem of divine power and love and universality. — James Joyce

Septimus had no need to untie Spit Fyre as the dragon had already chewed his way through the rope. They followed Aunt Zelda and Jenna out the side door at the foot of the turret and down to the Palace Gate. Aunt Zelda kept up a brisk pace. Showing a surprising knowledge of the Castle's narrow alleyways and sideslips, she hurtled along. Oncoming pedestrians were taken aback at the sight of the large patchwork tent approaching them at full speed. They flattened themselves against the walls, and, as the tent passed by with the Princess, the ExtraOrdinary Apprentice and a feral-looking boy with bandaged hands - not to mention a dragon - in its wake, people rubbed their eyes in disbelief. — Angie Sage

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life. — Bertrand Russell

When a man sought knowledge, it would not be long before it could be seen in his humbleness, his sight, upon his tongue and his hands, in his prayer, in his speech and in his disinterest (zuhd) in worldly allurements. And a man would acquire a portion of knowledge and put it into practice, and it would be better for him than the world and all it contains - if he owned it he would give it in exchange for the hereafter. — Hasan Of Basra

Now, we see what we are shown. We have gotten used to being shown no matter what, within or beyond the limited range of human sight. This habituation to the monopoly of visualization-on-command strongly suggests that only those things that can in some way be visualized, recorded, and replayed at will are part of reality ... The result is a strange mistrusts of our own eyes, a disposition to take as real only that which is mechanically displayed in a photograph, a statistical curve, or a table. Eyewitness testimony must be "substantiated" by records that have been acquired, and can be stored and then shown. — Barbara Duden

The knowledge of courtesy and good manners is a very necessary study. It is like grace and beauty, that which begets liking and an inclination to love one another at the first sight. — Michel De Montaigne

I pray we ... come to this darkness so far above light! If only we lacked sight and knowledge so as to see, so as to know, unseeing and unknowing, that which lies beyond all vision and knowledge. For this would be really to see and to know: to praise the Transcendent One in a transcending way ... We would be like sculptors who set out to carve a statue. They remove every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image, and simply by the act of clearing aside they show up the beauty which is hidden. — Pope Dionysius

Through seven figures come sensations for a man; there is hearing for sounds, sight for the visible, nostril for smell, tongue for pleasant or unpleasant tastes, mouth for speech, body for touch, passages outwards and inwards for hot or cold breath. Through these come knowledge or lack of it. — Hippocrates

Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of themanly contemplation of the whole. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

So I decided to do it [hike the Appalachian Trail]. More rashly, I announced my intention - told friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those who knew me. Then I bought some books ... It required only a little light reading in adventure books and almost no imagination to envision circumstances in which I would find myself caught in a tightening circle of hunger-emboldened wolves, staggering and shredding clothes under an onslaught of pincered fire ants, or dumbly transfixed by the sight of enlivened undergrowth advancing towards me, like a torpedo through water, before being bowled backwards by a sofa-sized boar with cold beady eyes, a piercing squeal, and slaverous, chopping appetite for pink, plump, city-softened flesh. — Bill Bryson

There is a vital lesson to be learned here, a truth our society must not lose sight of, and that is the sanctity of every human life and the dignity of every individual. Increasingly, in a world that seeks to establish its own knowledge and values without God, we find our concept of humanity falling through the cracks. If, as our children are so often taught, we are nothing but a cosmic accident that arose for no reason out of primordial slime, and that the stronger among us are necessarily the better among us, then where does love fit in, or kindness to those in need, or simply going out of our way to lend a hand to a fellow human being? — Frank E. Peretti

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes. — Henry David Thoreau

I do not believe there is any such sixth sense. A man with a good sense of direction is, to me, quite simply an able pathfinder - a natural navigator - somebody who can find his way by the use of the five senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch - the senses he was born with) developed by the blessing of experience and the use of intelligence. All that pathfinder needs is his senses and knowledge of how to interpret nature's signs. — Harold Gatty

I traveled for seven years, and when I came back home I was completely lost. I didn't know what to do with my life, so I decided to let people decide for me. For month I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following, not because the party interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, and finally lost sight of them. At the end of January 1980, I chose a man and followed him to Venice. That's how I started. That's all. — Sophie Calle

Sometimes we bring to a struggle or cause the gifts we see most clearly, a courage, a strength, or a charm others have told us we have. But often we find more is asked of us than that, more than we intended or thought we possessed. We are asked to offer that which we thought dearest, to forgive what seemed unpardonable, to face what we feared the most and endure it. Sometimes we have to travel to the last step a path that was not of our own choosing. But I promise you this ... it will lead to a greater joy in the end. The difficulty is that the end is beyond our sight, it is a matter of faith, not of knowledge. — Anne Perry

Brent suddenly thought back to Miss Gill, the mediator in Chicago, and her saying the effects of an act traveled far beyond one's knowledge. He knew she'd meant harmful acts, like his. He saw now that the same could be said for good deeds-good, bad, and indifferent-sent a wave rolling out of sight. He wondered what his own accounting, generations later, would look like. — Paul Fleischman

Since the moment when, at the sight of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of the new convictions, as he called them, which between the ages of twenty and thirty-four had imperceptibly replaced the beliefs of his childhood and youth, he had been less horrified by death than by life without the least knowledge of whence it came, what it is for, why, and what it is, Organisms, their destruction, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development - the terms that had superseded these beliefs - were very useful for mental purposes; but they gave no guidance for life, and Levin suddenly felt like a person who has exchanged a thick fur coat for a muslin garment and who, being out in the frost for the first time, becomes clearly convinced, not by arguments, but with the whole of his being, that he is as good as naked and that he must inevitably perish miserably. — Leo Tolstoy

If any one asks: 'Why should I accept the results of valid arguments based on true premisses?' we can only answer by appealing to our principle. In fact, the truth of the principle is impossible to doubt, and its obviousness is so great that at first sight it seems almost trivial. Such principles, however, are not trivial to the philosopher, for they show that we may have indubitable knowledge which is in no way derived from objects of sense. The — Bertrand Russell

The emptiness of the track stretched out before me and drifted as far as I could see. As no hikers were out tonight, it was just me and the rising stars. As I set off down the gravel track, a white moth fluttered over my path. Its dusty wings with their brown splotchy patterns lifted it higher. Then, before I had a chance to catch sight of it again, it spirited away. I'd never been the sort of child who wanted to chase butterflies, or catch things of beauty to keep and look at in a glass jar. But tonight, I'd wanted that moth. I'd wanted a moment, just a second, to catch it. Hold onto it. Maybe it was Tain's words still ringing in my ears. They don't live long. The knowledge that it might not be there tomorrow night, or tomorrow morning even, had cast it in a new light. It was suddenly a desperate need to see this thing. I spun around. The track was empty. Wherever it was gone, it was far away from me now. — Carmen Tudor

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight. — John Berger

He had crossed the room with no notion what he might say or do - he had no knowledge of the language of condolence, no skill at social small talk; his metier was business and politics. And yet, when his hostess had introduced them and left, he found himself still holding the hand he had kissed, looking into soft brown eyes that drowned his soul. And without further thought or hesitation had said, 'God help me, I am in love with you. — Diana Gabaldon

Geology is part of that remarkable dynamic process of the human mind which is generally called science and to which man is driven by an inquisitive urge. By noticing relationships in the results of his observations, he attempts to order and to explain the infinite variety of phenomena that at first sight may appear to be chaotic. In the history of civilization this type of progressive scientist has been characterized by Prometheus stealing the heavenly fire, by Adam eating from the tree of knowledge, by the Faustian ache for wisdom. — Reinout Willem Van Bemmelen

New generations of humans inherit the acquired discoveries of generations past, allowing cosmic insight to accumulate without limit. Each discovery of science therefore adds a rung to a ladder of knowledge whose end is not in sight because we are building the ladder as we go along. As far as I can tell, as we assemble and ascend this ladder, we will forever uncover the secrets of the universe - one by one. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson