Quotes About Clarity

The field cannot be well seen from within the field.

As the eyes of Lyncæus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.

Truths will harmonize; and as for the falsities and mistakes, they will speedily die of themselves.

Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space

If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.

Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Spiritual Laws," Essays and Lectures . (Library of America November 15, 1983)

The freer I get, the higher I go. The higher I go, the more I see. The more I see, the less I know. The less I know, the more I'm free.

Ephrem the Syrian says, 'Good speech is silver, but silence is pure gold.' "—Way of a Pilgrim

Knowledge all by itself, without deep wisdom, ends up becoming despair.

The epitome of the human realm is to be stuck in a huge traffic jam of discursive thought. —Chogyam Trungpa

If you listen to your own inner voice, it will tell you where you are now, and which method will work best for you in your evolution towards the light.

Sooner or later the realization comes that nothing we can think of is going to do it.

The Great Way is not difficult for those not attached to preferences. When neither love nor hate arises, all is clear and undisguised. Separate by the smallest amount, however, and you are as far from it as heaven is from earth. —Seng-ts'an, Third Patriarch of Zen

The goal of the path is to BE high, not GET high.

Instead of always preoccupying ourselves with trying to get what we think we want or need, we'll start to quiet, we'll start to listen. We'll wait for that inner prompting. We'll try to hear, rather than decide, what it is we should do next.

Calm yourself. Think with your intellect, not your burning heart, and you will see what I must do.

Simplicity could only have been bought at a great price in accuracy.

The conflicting missions of the two armies seemed to have no fog, no gray, only black-and-white clarity. I had lived my life in terms of compromise, rule-bending, trade-offs, concessions, bargaining, striking deals, finding middle ground. In these two great armies, there was no such thing. Good was good, and evil was evil, and they shared no common ground.

Any striving for understanding that we do is likely to hold back the darkness.

there are no absolute rights or wrongs; rather, there is less understanding and more understanding.

the power of a lens is incredible.

We see through a glass darkly because all we want is to be comfortable.

May I suggest that the challenge of Jesus' earthly ministry was to enable us to see the message so that the picture could be understood.