Quotes
Quotes about Vision
Visions for those too tired to sleep, These seeds cast a film over eyes which weep.
Letters, from absent friends, extinguish fear, Unite division, and draw distance near; Their magic force each silent wish conveys, And wafts embodied though, a thousand ways: Could souls to bodies write, death's pow'r were mean, For minds could then meet minds with heav'n between.
The first years of man must make provision for the last.
Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness. They are more willing to follow their own vision, even when it takes them far from the mainland of the human community. Unexplored places do not frighten them- or not, at any rate, as much as they frighten those around them. This is one of the secrets of their power. That which we call "genius" has a great deal to do with courage and daring, a great deal to do with nerve.
When we find a thinker reflecting or echoing an apparently erroneous, narrow, or even illogical thought that was popular or authoritative in his time, we must never rule out the possibility that what we have discovered is not the limit of his vision but only an example of his deliberate rhetorical accommodation to reigning prejudice which he does not share but thinks it best not to expose.
It is a juvenile notion that a society needs a lofty purpose and a shining vision to achieve much. Both in the marketplace and on the battlefield men who set their hearts on toys have often displayed unequal initiative and drive. And one must be ignorant of the creative process to look for a close correspondence between motive and achievement in the world of thought and imagination.
The people who shape our lives and our cultures have the ability to communicate a vision or a quest or a joy or a mission.
And the Lord answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.
Nothing as mundane as mere evidence can be allowed to threaten a vision so deeply satisfying.
Various kinds of ideas can be classified by their relationship to the authentication process. There are ideas systematically prepared for authentication ("theories"), ideas not derived from any systematic process ("visions"), ideas which could not survive any reasonable authentication process ("illusions"), ideas which exempt themselves from any authentication process ("myths"), ideas which have already passed authentication processes ("facts"), as well as ideas known to have failed- or certain to fail- such processes ("falsehoods" - both mistakes and lies).
Give to us clear vision that we may know where to stand and what to stand for--because unless we stand for something, we shall fall for anything.
The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision.
Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow-- You are not wrong who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
Light Winged Smoke Lightwinged Smoke, Icarian bird, Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight, Lark without song, and the messenger of dawn, Circling above the hamlets as thy nest; Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts; By night star-veiling, and by day Darkening the light and blotting out the sun; Go thou my incense upward from this hearth, And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame. -Henry David Thoreau-.
The king-becoming graces, As justice, verity, temp'rance, stableness, Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude, I have no relish of them, but abound In the division of each several crime, Acting in many ways.
There is only one nature--the division into science and engineering is a human imposition, not a natural one. Indeed, the division is a human failure; it reflects our limited capacity to comprehend the whole.
Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.
You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.
The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world.
Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
Fundamentalist religion is the most pervasive vision of central planning, though many fundamentalists may oppose human central planning as a usurpation or "playing God." This is consistent with the fundamentalist vision of an unconstrained God and a highly constrained man.
People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.
The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. The mob and the intellectuals derived from it the vision of a Golden Age which would arrive without fail once the noble human race could act according to its whims.
Sorrow preys upon Its solitude, and nothing more diverts it From its sad visions of the other world Than calling it at moments back to this. The busy have no time for tears.
Behold, within the leafy shade, Those bright blue eggs together laid! On me the chance-discovered sight Gleamed like a vision of delight.
