David Berman Quotes

If it were not for the outside world, we would have no inside world to understand things by. Least of all could we understand God without these millions of sights and sounds and scents and motions, weaving their endless harmonies. They come out of His heart to let us know a little of what is in it.

Perhaps looking out through big baby eyes - if we could - would not be as revelatory experience as many imagine. We might see a world inhabited by objects and people, a world infused with causation, agency, and morality - a world that would surprise us not by its freshness but by its familiarity.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

The eye is the most refined of our senses, the one which communicates most directly with our mind, our consciousness.

I think that the greatest gift God ever gave man is not the gift of sight but the gift of vision. Sight is a function of the eyes, but vision is a function of the heart.

Did men but consider that the sun, moon, and stars, and every other object of the senses, are only so many sensations in their minds, which have no other existence but barely being perceived, doubtless they would never fall down and worship their own ideas; but rather address their homage to that eternal invisible Mind which produces and sustains all things.

We never see a tree except through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. Look at a tree and you will find how extraordinarily difficult it is to see it completely, so that no image, no screen, comes between the seeing and the actual fact. By completely I mean with the totality of your mind and heart, not a fragment of it.

Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses.

I have never been disabled in my dreams.

Thought is the measure of life.

How alive is thought, invisible, yet without thought there is no sight.

The eyes envy the mind.

The world cannot be translated; It can only be dreamed of and touched.

Sight is the noblest sense of man.

There is in the blind as in the seeing an Absolute which gives truth to what we know to be true, order to what is orderly, beauty to the beautiful, touchableness to what is tangible.

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

But we have been taught to see before our eyes have found out a way of seeing for themselves.

Things of which there is sight, hearing, apprehension, these I prefer.

It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth.

Sight is a faculty; seeing is an art.

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.

It is only with the eyes open that a corporeal form returns, and assembles itself firmly around the hard core of sight.

Sight is what you see with your eyes, vision is what you see with your mind.

If you keep examining your mind, you'll come to see that thoughts of who you are and how it all is are creating the reality you're experiencing.