Robert McAfee Brown Quotes

It is necessary to keep one's compass in one's eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.

It's an interesting education to listen to cricket commentary when you're not at the game. When you're there, which is most of the time for me, it flows over you. But when you're not there, you look at it in a slightly different way. You pick up things.

We look at what we do to determine who we are.

What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe.

... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?

In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.

We see only that which we are.

How you think determines how you act. How you act in turn determines how others react to you.

People are watching the way we act, more than they are listening to what we say.

It's no good operating on eyes if your eyes are asleep.

Be the first to see what you see as you see it.

The question is not what you look at – but how you look & whether you see.

Don't let your eyes refuse to seeDon't let your ears refuse to hear

See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.

... it's always interesting when one doesn't see. If you don't see what a thing means, you must be looking at it wrong way round.

Look up and down and round about you.!

If you give people more perspective of one object, they start to see it more clearly.

Not every man with a heart is understanding, nor every man with an ear a listener, and nor every man with eyes able to see.

Before you attempt to set things right, make sure you see things right.

We forget that the world is what we imagine it to be. We stop being the sun and become, instead, the pool of water reflecting it.

There is always something to see, if you only know how to look.

Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.

Also, where does your identity come from? Your memory, of course.

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

The difference between living and half living is seeing well, looking for associations between things, seeking the connections, being aware of scale and proportion.