Seeing Ourselves Quotes

Rather than seeing ourselves as insignificant specks in the immensity of the cosmos, we can consider that immensity an indicator of our worth. It seems the Creator invested a great deal-a universe of 50 billion trillion stars, plus a hundred times more matter, all fine-tuned to mind-boggling precision-for us. If not for the strength and abundance of evidence in support of that notion, it would seem the height of arrogance. Humility demands that we take a deeper and wider look at that evidence. ~ Hugh Ross

Many people meditate in order that a third eye may open. For that they feel they should close their two physical eyes. They thereby become blind to the world. But the fact is that the third eye will never open. We can never close our eyes to the world in the name of spirituality. Self-realization is the ability to see ourselves in all beings. This is the third eye through which you see, even while your two eyes are open. We should be able to love and serve others, seeing ourselves in them. This is the fulfillment of spiritual practice. ~ Mata Amritanandamayi

I think our music is more about seeing ourselves in each other and trying to find a more humanistic viewpoint for the world. ~ Conor Oberst

The most serious thing, and the strangest, is that we are afraid to the point of panic, not so much of seeing ourselves as of being seen by ourselves. This is our root absurdity. What is behind this great fear? ~ Rene Daumal

Not having a group consciousness, whites often respond defensively when grouped with other whites, resenting what they see as unfair generalizations. Individualism prevents us from seeing ourselves as responsible for or accountable to other whites as members of a shared racial group that collectively benefits from racial inequality. ~ Robin DiAngelo

The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want to be. ~ Bell Hooks

It is in seeing ourselves whole that we can begin to see ways of working out our differences, of understanding our similarities and of finally forming the cohesive nation that can one day experience the 'domestic tranquility' so hoped for by the framers of the Constitution. ~ Robert C. Maynard

We spend our lives getting caught up in all the wrong things
led astray by our minds, our egos, seeing ourselves as separate from each other, rather than listening to the truth that lies within our own hearts, the truth that we are all connected, we are all in it together. ~ Alyson Noel

Not only do we avert our eyes from the hardcore drug addict to avoid seeing ourselves; we do so to avoid facing our share of responsibility. As we have seen, injection drug use more often than not arises in people who were abused and neglected as young children. The addict, in other words, is not born but made. His addiction is the result of a situation that he had no influence in creating.

His life expresses the history of the multigenerational family system of which he is a part, and his family exists as part of the broader culture and society. In society, as in Nature, each microcosmic unit reflects something of the whole. In the case of drug addiction, the sins of entire societies are visited unevenly on minority populations. ~ Gabor Mate

Maybe life isn't about seeing ourselves. Maybe it's about letting other people see us. ~ Rebekah Crane

Burning fossil fuels has given us the gift of seeing ourselves in new ways. But that very gift now enables us to see we've got to change our ways. ~ Sylvia Earle

Most of us want to have our minds continually occupied so that we are prevented from seeing ourselves as we actually are. We are afraid to be empty. We are afraid to look at our fears. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

[M]an [has] the power of abstraction from himself[.] ~ Ludwig Feuerbach

In our daily lives, we see ourselves often in very reductive ways. I want to explore motion, change and flux, whether we are looking in the mirror or seeing ourselves in our surroundings. The singular view of self contradicts the act of living. ~ Doug Aitken

God is the reason expressing, affirming itself as the highest existence. To the imagination, the reason is the revelation of God; but to the reason, God is the revelation of the reason[.] ~ Ludwig Feuerbach

There is no moral reason for humanity to continue, if its ends are limited to itself. And this is how we must stop seeing ourselves. This is why we destroy each other. If we disregard the life around us, why should we not be equally disregarded? ~ Paul Xylinides

That, of course, was the thing about the fifties with all their patina of familial bliss: A lot of the memories were not happy, not mine, not my friends'. That's probably why the myth so endures, because of the dissonance in our lives between what actually went on at home and what went on up there on those TV screens where we were allegedly seeing ourselves reflected back. ~ Anne Taylor Fleming

Visualize the success, not the failure.

This part is tough for us perfectionists. We have a hard time ever seeing ourselves as winners; our heads tend to go to a place of "Nothing is going right." Don't get hung up on the minutiae. Say what you want, out loud, over and over again. Sound crazy? It works. Before I go onto the competition floor, sometimes I look in the mirror and say out loud, "I want you to do your very best, and I want you to be passionate and be in the moment." Giving myself those marching orders often reminds me to focus on the positive instead of getting lost in what might be wrong (but likely is just in my head). ~ Derek Hough

Unfortunately, in seeing ourselves as we truly are, not all that we see is beautiful and attractive. This is undoubtedly part of the reason we flee silence. We do not want to be confronted with our hypocrisy, our phoniness. We see how false and fragile is the false self we project. We have to go through this painful experience to come to our true self. ~ Basil Pennington

By seeing ourselves honestly, we have the capacity to understand others more deeply. ~ Helen LaKelly Hunt

The fear of seeing ourselves as we are ensures we will never see the end of our fears. ~ Guy Finley

I think wearing less makeup can seem a bit scary for some women because we get so used to seeing ourselves look a certain way. ~ Louise Nurding

When we make the shift to seeing ourselves as transitionary events - as verbs rather than as nouns - we can step back and allow the flow to continue. Our efforts shift from controlling the circumstances of our lives to learning how to meet each brief moment fully and wholeheartedly. ~ Christopher K Germer

I am wondering if many of the things that we say about ourselves as women, are actually responsible for leading us down detrimental paths in life. For example, usually we like to say that we're crazy, messy and lost. But when I think about it, I want to be of sound mind, with purpose and unlost (if there is such a word as unlost). Really, who wants to be mentally unstable and eternally insecure? I think maybe we need to stop saying these things about ourselves and we need to start seeing ourselves as what and who we really want to be. ~ C. JoyBell C.

On a national level there is a tendency to portray Latino culture as a monolithic entity, which is a really inaccurate way of seeing ourselves. There is as much diversity and uniqueness within the Latino culture as there is in any other kind of American culture. ~ Benjamin Bratt

Instead of seeing ourselves as people trying to connect with people, let's see the church as people trying to connect with God and help others do the same. ~ James MacDonald

We read because they teach us about people, we can see ourselves in them,in their problems.And by seeing ourselves in them, we clarify ourselves, we explain ourselves to ourselves, so we can live with ourselves ... ~ F. Sionil Jose

Moreover, seeing ourselves as a majority led at times to both a theological downgrade and a counter-productive public stance. The application of the promises to Israel to the United States of America, for example, caused many to miss, as we will see in the next chapter, the meaning of the kingdom of God, and thus to bypass Jesus Christ himself. The idea of America as a Christian nation is able to get "Amens" in the churches only as long as the churches believe America is, at least in some ways, with us and not against us. But what happens when the cultural climate starts to shift in obvious ways? If the church believes the United States is a sort of new Israel, then we become frantic when we see ourselves "losing America." We then start to speak in gloomy terms of America as, at best, Babylon, a place of hopeless exile, or, at worst, Gomorrah, slouching toward the judgment of God. ~ Russell D. Moore

We have to care what someone thinks of us. We are incapable of seeing ourselves [sometimes]. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

Seeing ourselves as we want to be is a key to personal growth. To successfully bring about change in our lives we need to implement a system of change that is build upon three assumptions. First Assumption: We change our lives by changing the attitudes of our minds. Second Assumption: We become what we think about all day long. Third Assumption: Our mind is naturally goal seeking. Please remember these assumptions. Our mind is always trying to accomplish something. We have a powerful machine wanting to achieve goals. It will set the goals that we allow it to. ~ Hyrum W. Smith

Seeing ourselves as others see us would probably confirm our worst suspicions about them. ~ Franklin P. Adams

Hypocrisy - in other words, the practice of lying about lying - shields us from seeing ourselves as we are: a collocation of fragments that fit together as a biological unit but not as anything else, not as that ghost which has been called a self, a phantasm whose ecotoplasmic unreality we can never see through. By staying true to the lie of the self, the ego, we can hold onto the illusion that we will be who we are all our lives and not see our selves die a thousand times before our death. While some have dedicated themselves to getting to the bottom of how these parts create the illusion of a whole, this is not how pyramids are built. To get a pyramid off the ground takes a lot of ego - the base material of those stacks of stones that tourists visit while on vacation. Of course, a pyramid is actually a polyhedron, that is, a mathematical conception which pyramids in the physical world resemble . . . at least from a distance. The nearer one gets to a pyramid, the more it reveals itself to be what it is: a roughly pyramidal conglomeration of bricks, a composition of fragments that is not what it seems to be. This is also how it works with humans. The world around us encourages the build up of our egos - those pyramids of self-esteem - as if we needed such encouragement. Although everyone is affected by this pyramid scheme, some participate in it more than others: they are observably more full of themselves and tend to their egos as they would exotic plants in a hothouse. It h ~ Thomas Ligotti

The day that each person willingly accepts himself or herself for who he or she is and acknowledges the uniqueness of God's framing process marks the beginning of a journey to seeing the handiwork of God in each life. ~ Ravi Zacharias

Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike. ~ Paul Auster

Or, to express this in another way, suggested to me by Professor Suzuki, in connection with seeing into our own nature, poetry is the something that we see, but the seeing and the something are one; without the seeing there is no something, no something, no seeing. There is neither discovery nor creation: only the perfect, indivisible experience. ~ Reginald Horace Blyth

People really do like seeing their best friends humiliated; a large part of the friendship is based on humiliation; and that is an old truth,well known to all intelligent people. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Yep, I went from seeing red to seeing fucking magenta. ~ Mariana Zapata

I love sleeping in my son's silly racecar bed. I love watching hours of 'Yo Gabba Gabba.' I love long playdates with his best friend Jack and traveling with Zev. Most of all I love coming home from work and seeing Zev run up to me saying, 'My mommy's home! My mommy's home!' ~ Marissa Jaret Winokur

Faith is the ability to see things that don't yet exist. Faith, though, can turn difficulty into reality, positive reality. ~ Jim Rohn

You'll be seeing him tomorrow night, anyway."

"I am?" Hyacinth asked, at precisely the moment Mr. St. Clair said, "She will?"

"You're accompanying me to the Pleinsworth poetry reading," Lady D told her grandson. "Or have you forgotten?"

Hyacinth sat back, enjoying the sight of Gareth St. Clair's mouth opening and closing in obvious distress. He looked a bit like a fish, she decided. A fish with the features of a Greek god, but still, a fish.

"I really…" he said. "That is to say, I can't - "

"You can, and you will be there," Lady D said. "You promised."

He regarded her with a stern expression. "I cannot imagine - "

"Well, if you didn't promise, you should have done, and if you love me…"

Hyacinth coughed to cover her laugh, then tried not to smirk when Mr. St. Clair shot a dirty look in her direction.

"When I die," he said, "surely my epitaph will read, 'He loved his grandmother when no one else would.'"

"And what's wrong with that?" Lady Danbury asked. ~ Julia Quinn

I felt like there should have been rainbows and rose petals in their wake or something.
Ugh.That was catty.
Jenna deserved rainbows and rose petals, I reminded myself as I flopped back on my bed, Dad's book bumping painfully against my sternum. After everything she'd been through, Jenna had earned an eternity of nothing but good stuff. So why did seeing her with Vix make me want to brain myself with Demonologies: A History? I looked at the nightstand again and sighed. Then I opened the heavy book and tried to make myself read.
For the next few hours I made a valiant attempt to get through Chapter One.
For a book that was supposedly about fallen angels running around and creating havoc with their super-awesome dark "magycks," it was awfully boring, and all the weird spellings definitely didn't help. ~ Rachel Hawkins

Sometimes it's interesting to see something that you're not used to seeing, which is the main ingredient of life, and it's removed from the usual entertainment. I think it's important to give the opportunity to people to witness the life of somebody who was not public. ~ Michel Gondry

Anecdote: In a controversial way, Comedian and actor Bill Cosby sought to teach his son the pain of being lied to. Convinced his son had been dishonest regarding an issue, Cosby promised that if he told him the truth, he would not hit him. When his son did confess, Cosby did hit him. Seeing his son's shock and hurt, Cosby said he hoped this lesson had deepened his understanding of the anguish generated by a sense betrayal. ~ Bill Cosby

One of hallmarks of a creative person is the ability to tolerate ambiguity, dissonance, inconsistency, things out of place. But one of the rules of a well-run corporation is that surprise is to be minimized. Yet if this rule were applied to the creative process, nothing worth reading would get written, nothing worth seeing would get painted, nothing worth living with and using would ever get designed. ~ Ralph Caplan

Denzel Washington: I like the collaboration, I like seeing people do well, so I really plan to direct the rest of my days. ~ Denzel Washington

One eye-witness weighs more than ten hearsays - Seeing is believing all the world over. ~ Plautus

Like most doctors, the fanciest ones, he seemed offensively healthy, as if he kept the real secret of vitality to himself. He would live forever and people would crumble and die around him. You were supposed to feel like death after seeing him, in terms of your complexion, your posture, your whole body. If necessary, this doctor would eat you to survive. ~ Ben Marcus

Yes, you will. And I will warn you now that not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them. They will be what you expect of them ... I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb."
"You can't make a race horse of a pig."
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make a very fast pig. ~ John Steinbeck

there was no way of seeing the one next to you. ~ Stephanie Hudson

At a certain point, I stopped seeing my clothing worn by people on the streets ... It seemed like they were being treated as museum items. ~ Yohji Yamamoto

Religion was at it's best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma. "The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith, rather than living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it," he told me. "I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's a great mystery. ~ Walter Isaacson

You must photograph where you are involved; where you are overwhelmed by what you see before you; where you hold your breath while releasing the shutter, not because you are afraid of jarring the camera, but because you are seeing with your guts wide open to the sweet pain of an image that is part of your life. ~ Harold Feinstein

I like it when I can hear directly from the writer: what they're seeing, what they're envisioning, and what their intention is. ~ Jennifer Hale

It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion. ~ Leo Tolstoy

If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty. ~ Muhammad Yunus

I'm not totally blind to the fact that I like people to see my work, but if it's not something I would enjoy seeing in a magazine, then I think I shouldn't be making it. I think that I don't represent only myself, I represent more people; I mean, if I like it, then I think more people will like it because I think I'm quite a normal guy. ~ Anton Corbijn

We look forward to seeing all of your Vaseline coated smiles terribly soon. ~ Gitty Daneshvari

Prayer is standing in the presence of God with the mind in the heart; that is, at that point of our being where there are no divisions or distinctions and where we are totally one. There God's Spirit dwells and there the great encounter takes place. There heart speaks to heart, because there we stand before the face of the Lord, all-seeing, with us. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee. ~ Evelyn Waugh

He glanced back at her over his shoulder, his incredible eyes moving over her face. Seeing her. Focusing on her. The way he looked at her made her heart begin to accelerate. ~ Christine Feehan

It doesn't take long to persuade each other to stop seeing a person as a person. And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming. ~ Fredrik Backman

Male female slave or free; peaceful or disorderly; maybe you and he will not agree; but you need him to show you new ways to see. ~ Bruce Cockburn

I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction. ~ Martin Scorsese

I was signed when I was 19 years old, in 1980. I went to Germany and France. Seeing the world at that time was just an awesome experience for a teenager. ~ Kurtis Blow

All the eyes of God are looking through all the stars, or looking at the stars through our eyes. There's only the eye of God everywhere, seeing and being in perfection always. ~ Frederick Lenz

It is almost as though
something else is breathing

quite close by, invisibly.
The mystery of the names…
Albizzia. Gleditsia.

Aucuba japonica. And
I am listening, seeing. Seeing,
like someone twice alive. ~ John Allison

Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time. ~ Cesare Pavese

Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you're really seeing are not his limitations but yours. ~ Pico Iyer

You can't change where you from. You can't take a person out of their zone and expect them to be somebody else now that they in the record industry. It's gonna take years. Years of travelling. Years of meeting people. Years of seeing the world. ~ Kendrick Lamar

My dad's a scratch golfer and I've got the knack of seeing something and then replicating it. I saw my dad swing a club and I worked out how to do the same thing. My backswing and follow-through have been basically the same since I was two. ~ Rory McIlroy

The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. "Confirmation ~ Michael Lewis

I have to resort to email, and email is not enough. I am starting to get tired of relying on words. They are full of meaning, yes, but they lack sensation. Writing to her is not the same as seeing her face as she listens. Hearing back from her is not the same as hearing her voice. ~ David Levithan

They were looking at videos, and the woman was giggling quietly, as they often do in porn stores, unable to believe what they're seeing, the monuments men have built to vaginas and to the very notion of sex. ~ Drew Nellins Smith

So many of the stories are about perspective and viewpoint. It's not just about seeing and revelation. The idea of having many different stories from many different perspectives has something to do with me trying to deal with the impossibility of having a wide enough view to say anything really convincing on that scale. ~ Lucy Corin

With so much sky and so much river, you couldn't help seeing the big picture. It was what you already knew, but crowding into the subway or rushing to a movie, you only saw it for a second, and close up. Now I took a good long look. I'd always heard you couldn't see stars in Manhattan because of all the lights. But here they all were. Here was my night in shining armor. ~ Melissa Bank

Sunk in the mud, it took all my strength to flip it over. I lifted out the oar and inspected the bottom for holes and rotted wood. Seeing none, I gathered up my skirt, climbed in, and paddled to the middle of the pond, an untouchable place, far from everything. I tried to think what I would say to him, worried my voice would slink off again and leave me. I remained there a long while, lapping on the surface. Vapor curled on the water, dragonflies pricked the air, and I thought it all beautiful. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

That was one time,and it was only for three days,as you well know-"
But I barely get to finish before she's shaking her head, practically shouting, "It was four days,Daire. Four."
"That's only because of the time difference and you know it," I mumble, thinking how sad it is that after weeks of not seeing each other,this is the way she chooses to greet me.But now that she's started,I'm not in much of a hugging mood either. "The point is,it was just once,and there were special circumstances involved sine I was"-enduring a vision quest/full-body dismemberment in a remote cave-"not feeling well ... due to my injuries from the accident and all. ~ Alyson Noel

A man is the creator – he creates everything – all these deities. Nobody wants to keep a man like man. They will always try to drag down human being from his higher place and so they created different gods and goddesses. Seeing all these anomalies it seems that all these people have tried to displace man from his higher place to downwards. ~ Sri Jibankrishna Or Diamond

In morals, theosophy builds its teachings on the unity, seeing in each form the expression of a common life, and therefore the fact that what injures one injures all. To do evil i.e., to throw poison into the life-blood of humanity, is a crime against the unity. ~ Annie Besant

It was like seeing someone in the middle of a snowy field with no footsteps around them. Everyone has to get to where they are. ~ Jac Jemc

For me, fashion is an expression of who I am right in that moment - so what you're seeing is what I'm influenced by now. ~ Jennifer Lopez