Allen Tate Quotes

If you pay attention to the world, it's an amazing place. If you don't, it's whatever you think it is.

Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.

We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

The eye of understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or levels, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.

We have ... dreamed so much and observed so little, that our imaginations have grown larger than the world we live in, and our judgments have dwindled down to a point.

As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.

Life is but thought.

If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

Open your eyes and then open your eyes again.

The rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at, but the moment when we are capable of seeing.

One looks, looks long, and the world comes in.

All the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice.

Your frame of reference is what you see.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

Nature is what you see plus what you think about it.

One can travel this world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.

Can you step back from your own mind and thus understand all things?

To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

The world is speaking to you every day, you just don't know how to listen.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

Thought can never be compared with action, but when it awakens in us the image of truth.

Direct thy attention to what is said. Let thy understanding enter into the things that are doing and the things which do them.

Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe.