Quotes About Clarity

Anger is a call for awareness.

He could see. And he walked along, feeling the joy of a man who sees, a joy that a man tends to forget in sufficient light.

When the mind's an empty room The clear days come.

He stands under them, looks up, sees, knows, and knows that he does not know.

The theologian William E. Hull, worrying over the destructive animosities that divide religious organizations, asked, "How can we avoid the wrangling that breeds hostility?" And he answered: "By seeking clarity rather than victory" (Beyond the Barriers, p. 169).

Teaching as a purpose, as such, is difficult to prescribe or talk about because the thing it is proposing to make is usually something so vague as "understanding.

Death is a sort of lens, thought I used to think of it as a wall or shut door. It changes things and makes them clear.

These and other things seem clear when they are off on the outer verges of my mind, but then, when I try to see them straight, they grow misty and fade away under the burden of questions.

a place where thought can take its shape as quietly in the mind as water in a pitcher...

In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

A perfect morning; in perfect harmony with myself I'm walking briskly uphill.... For once I didn't notice that I was walking, all the way up to the mountaintop forest I was absorbed in deep thought. Perfect clarity and freshness in the air, up further there's some snow. The tangerines make me completely euphoric.

The truly terrible thing about this life, was not knowing what you want, but only able to recognize what you do not want. You have to spend so much time and energy trying to find it out, time that other people spent in pursuing of their desires.

When a woman wants me to do anything (my daughter, or not, it doesn't matter), I always insist on knowing why. The oftener you make them rummage their own minds for a reason, the more manageable you will find them in all the relations of life. It isn't their fault (poor wretches!) that they act first and think afterwards; it's the fault of the fools who humour them.

We often hear, almost invariably, however, from superficial observers, that guilt can look like innocence. I believe it to be infinitely the truer axiom of the two that innocence can look like guilt.

tenait, une vive clarté rejaillissait sur ses

A confused sensation of having suddenly lost my familiarity with the past, without acquiring any additional clearness of idea in reference to the present or the future, took possession of my mind. Circumstances that were but a few days old, faded back in my memory, as if they had happened months and months since.

Don't let me think—that is all I ask now, Marian—don't let me think.

Death like style is the removal of rubbish.

Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous.

that I think many things with the clearest conviction, . . . which I never have the courage to say; but I will never say anything which I do not think.

Passion without reason is blind, reason without passion is dead. Thought should not lack the heat of desire, nor desire the light of thought.

No man when conscious attains to true or inspired intuition, but rather when the power of intellect is fettered in sleep or by disease or dementia";

One must pay a penalty for having a prejudice against obscurity.