Blindness Quotes - Page 13

• Evil denotes the lack of good. Not every absence of good is an evil, for absence may be taken either in a purely negative or in aprivative sense. Mere negation does not display the character of evil, otherwise nonexistents would be evil and moreover, a thing would be evil for not possessing the goodness of something else, which would mean that man is bad for not having the strength of a lion or the speed of a wild goat. But what is evil is privation; in this sense blindness means the privation of sight.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Taken, Character, Mean

  Saint Thomas Aquinas (1951). “Philosophical Texts”, London : Oxford University Press

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• What was the opposite of linkage blindness? What described being certain of something without any kind of evidence?...The term was faith.

  Barry Lyga

  Opposites, Kind, Certain

  Barry Lyga (2012). “I Hunt Killers”, p.56, Random House

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• Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.

  Richard Dawkins

  Suffering, Atheism, Kind

  Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love”, p.9, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Do you call the jewel blind, because your eye is?

  Franz Grillparzer

  Eye, Jewels, Perception

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• All that stock of arguments [the skeptics] produce to depreciate our faculties, and make mankind appear ignorant and low, are drawn principally from this head, to wit, that we are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things.

  George Berkeley

  Real, Ignorant, Argument

  George Berkeley (1982). “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge ...”, p.62, Hackett Publishing

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• It amazes me when I hear any person prefer blindness to deafness. Such a person must have a terrible dread of being alone. Blindness makes one totally dependent on others, and deprives us of every satisfaction that results from light.

  Horace Walpole

  Light, Satisfaction, Deafness

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• It is unheard-of, uncivilized barbarism that any woman should still be forced to bear such monstrous torture. It should be remedied. It should be stopped. It is simply absurd that, with our modern science, painless childbirth does not exist as a matter of course.... I tremble with indignation when I think ofthe unspeakable egotism and blindness of men of science who permit such atrocities when they can be remedied.

  Isadora Duncan

  Men, Thinking, Matter

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• the heart,
  this child of myself that resides in the flesh,
  this ultimate signature of the me, the start
  of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche.

  Anne Sexton

  Children, Heart, Sleep

  Anne Sexton (1999). “Love Poems”, p.25, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Then let not what I cannot have
  My cheer of mind destroy.
  Whilst thus I sing, I am a king,
  Although a poor blind boy!

  Colley Cibber

  Kings, Cheer, Boys

  Colley Cibber, “The Blind Boy”

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• How can you say that love is blind? Keener than a young eagle's is its sight.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Love, Sight, Eagles

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• Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden exchange meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty.

  Samuel Johnson

  Marriage, Dream, Home

  Samuel Johnson, Peter Martin (2009). “Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings”, p.310, Harvard University Press

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• Let us say it now: to be blind and to be loved, is indeed, upon this earth where nothing is complete, one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness.

  Victor Hugo

  Love, Earth, Blind

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• Slavery in America was perpetuated not merely by human badness but also by human blindness. ... Men convinced themselves that a system that was so economically profitable must be morally justifiable. ... Science was commandeered to prove the biological inferiority of the Negro. Even philosophical logic was manipulated [exemplified by] an Aristotlian syllogism:
  All men are made in the image of God;
  God, as everyone knows, is not a Negro;
  Therefore, the Negro is not a man.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Money, Philosophical, Men

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• Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

  George Santayana

  Atheism, Life Is, Judged

  George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana: Soliloquies in England and Later soliloquies”

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• the very notion of blindness about color constitutes an ideological confusion at best, and denial at its very worst.

  Patricia J. Williams

  Color, Racism, Confusion

  Patricia J. Williams (2016). “Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race”, p.4, Macmillan

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• Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed the victim. It has been abetted in its blindness by theories, still in keeping with the pedagogical principles of our great- grandparents, according to which children are viewed as crafty creatures, dominated by wicked drives, who invent stories and attack their innocent parents or desire them sexually. In reality, children tend to blame themselves for their parents' cruelty and to absolve the parents, whom they invariably love, of all responsibility.

  Alice Miller

  Children, Responsibility, Reality

  Alice Miller (2012). “The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness”, p.169, Anchor

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• And I saw that truly nothing happens by accident or luck, but everything by God's wise providence. If it seems to be accident or luck from our point of view, our blindness and lack of foreknowledge is the cause; for matters that have been in God's foreseeing wisdom since before time began befall us suddenly, all unawares; and so in our blindness and ignorance we say that this is accident or luck, but to our Lord God it is not so.

  Julian of Norwich

  Wise, Ignorance, Views

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• A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.

  Stephen King

  Lonely, Children, Real

  Stephen King (2016). “It”, p.190, Simon and Schuster

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• Those true eyes, Too pure and too honest in aught to disguise, The sweet soul shining through them.

  Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton

  Sweet, Eye, Love At First Sight

  "Lucile". Book by Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, 1860.

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• Cruise passengers can be blinded to the very real perils of the sea by ship operators unwilling to interrupt the party for security warnings. And after an incident occurs, a thorough investigation can be profoundly difficult when the crime scene literally floats away, on schedule, to its next port of call.

  Chris Shays

  Real, Party, Sea

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• When the people stare at the sky and dream of blessedness, or when they quiver with fear for hell after death, their eyes get blinded so they can't see their own right of primogeniture.

  Gerrard Winstanley

  Dream, Eye, Sky

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• Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally - oh, very rarely! - the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.

  Robert E. Howard

  Reality, Men, Giving

  Robert E. Howard (2016). “THE CTHULHU MYTHOS – Complete Collection: The Children of the Night, The Black Stone, The Thing on the Roof, The Challenge From Beyond & The Fire of Asshurbanipal: The Gateway into the Ancient Dimension of Terror Inhabited with Unspeakable Creatures, a Pantheon of Alien Extra-Dimensional Deities and Mythical Horrors Which Predate Humanity”, p.14, e-artnow

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• Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry.

  Dylan Thomas

  Vision, Naked, Movement

  Dylan Thomas (1968). “Quite Early One Morning”, p.119, New Directions Publishing

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• Love and hatred are not blind, but are blinded by the fire they bear within themselves.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Hate, Fire, Hatred

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• There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of living well.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Art, Fate, Destiny

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2015). “The Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Plays, Memoirs, Travel Sketches, Letters and Essays (Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer, containing Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, Catriona and A Child's Garden of Verses”, p.4161, e-artnow

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