Quotes About Clarity

There things are well enough, but all you need is to know what you want, and to want it badly enough so that it will stay in your thoughts.

We write to make sense of it all.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

How do I know what I think till I see what I say?

It is not an unusual life curve for Westerners - to live i n and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space clarity & hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give, and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment.

How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention. Sure, it's autobiography. Sure, it's fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, it's true.

As it turned out, the obvious clearly stated, and combined with new observations, was sometimes close to revolutionary.

This is not a journal", he wrote, "it is not notes for a novel, not a line-a-day record of the trivia my mind dredges up. Call it an attempt to understand." (Bruce) -Wallace Stegner (The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Pg. 436)

The inconceivable idea of the sun.You must become an ignorant man againAnd see the sun again with an ignorant eyeAnd see it clearly in the idea of it.

And one trembles to be so understood and, at last,To understand, as if to know becameThe fatality of seeing things too well.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things.... It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause...

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.

One must have a mind of winter.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

that's the funny thing about mazes: what's baffling on the ground begins to makes sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself". (p. 717)

The root of all evil is ignorance (avijj?) and false views (micch?di??hi). It is an undeniable fact that as long as there is doubt, perplexity, wavering, no progress is possible.

You may see the light, but the light is not the result of your eyesight.

One should be bold and sincere and look at one's own mind as one looks at one's face in a mirror. Here is no attitude of criticizing or judging, or discriminating between right and wrong, or good and bad. It is simply observing, watching, examining. You are not a judge, but a scientist. When you observe your mind, and see its true nature clearly, you become dispassionate with regard to its emotions, sentiments and states.

Having lost sight of our objectives, we redoubled our efforts.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.