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vision quotes

  • Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he. 100

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Proverbs 29:18.

  • Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision seesthings as theyare, not as they ought to be.

    - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
      The Cynic's Word Book. Retitled  The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

  •    It is not the constant thought of their sins, but the vision of the holiness of God that makes the saints aware of their own sinfulness.

    -Sourozh
      Living Prayer.

  • Mastery in poetry consists largely in the instinct for not ruining or smothering or tinkering with moments of vision.

    - Edmund Charles Blunden
      'Leigh Hunt'.

  • A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora.

    - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
      'Kubla Khan'.

  • He cried inawhisperat some image, at some visionhe cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: 'The horror! The horror!'

    -Korzeniowski
      Kurtz's final words. Heart of Darkness, pt.3 (first published in Blackwood's Magazine, collected in Youth:  A Narrative, and Two Other Stories,1902).

  • It hasnovision, noforesight, nosight at all.If itcanbe said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker. See Paley 635:16.

    - Richard Dawkins
      Of natural selection. The Blind Watchmaker, ch.1.

  • The people's prayer, the glad diviner's theme, The young men's vision and the old men's dream! See Bible106:5.

    -John Dryden
    Absalom and  Achitophel, pt.1, l.238^9.

  •    If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

    - George pseudonym of  MaryAnn Evans Eliot
    ^2  Middlemarch, bk.2, ch.20.

  • Poetrytriestotell you about a vision intheunvisionary language of farm, city and love.

    - Paul Hamilton Engle
      In Life, 28 May.

  • Boy, I got vision. The rest of the world wears bifocals.

    -William Goldman
       Anachronistic line delivered by Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

  • I am for encouraging the progress of science in all its branches; and notfor†awing thehumanmind bystories of raw-head and bloody bones to a distrust of its own vision and to repose implicitly on that of others.

    -Thomas Jefferson
      Letter, 26  Jan.

  • The highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself† In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.

    -John F(itzgerald) Kennedy
       At the dedication of  Amherst College Robert Frost Library, 25 Oct.

  • The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.

    - HenryAlfred Kissinger
      Years of Upheaval.

  • Now mancannot live without somevisionof himself.But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.

    - D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence
      'The Risen Lord'.

  • I thought that the best thing to do was to settle up these littlelocal difficulties, and thenturntothewider visionof the Commonwealth.

    -Stockton
      On departing for a Commonwealth conference, after sacking several members of his Cabinet in his Night of the Long Knives,  Jan.

  • Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.

    - Norman Kingsley Mailer
      The Presidential Papers, preface.

  • Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly† Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

    - Henry Valentine Miller
      The World of Sex.

  • Science provides a vision of reality seen from the perspective of reason, a perspective that sees the vast order of the universe, living and non-living matter, as a material system governed by rules that can be known by the human mind.It is a powerful vision, formal and austere but strangely silent about many of the questions that deeplyconcernus. Scienceshowsuswhat existsbut not what to do about it.

    - Heinz R(udolf) Pagels
      The Dreams of Reason. US writer, Professor of Humanities  at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia.  Her  works  include  Sexual  Personae  (1990)  and Vamps andTramps (1994).

  • I saw dawn upon them like the sun a vision of a time when all men walk proudly through the earth and the bombs and missiles lie at the bottom of the ocean like the bones of dinosaurs buried under the shale of eras.

    - Dudley Randall
      Cities Burning,'Roses and Revolutions'.

  • Then washed in the brightness of this vision, I saw how in its radiance would grow and be nourished and suddenly burst into terrible and splendid bloom the blood-red flower of revolution.

    - Dudley Randall
      Cities Burning,'Roses and Revolutions'.

  • La visio  n de una Ame  rica deslatinizada por propia voluntad, sin la extorsio  n de la conquista, y regenerada luego a imagen y semejanza del arquetipo del Norte, flota ya sobre los suen‹  os de muchos sinceros interesados por nuestro porvenir† Tenemos nuestra nordoman|a. Es necesario oponerle los l|mites que la razo  n y el sentimiento sen‹  alan. The vision of an America de-Latinized of its own will, without threat of conquest, and reconstituted in the image and likeness of the North, now looms in the nightmares of many who are genuinely concerned about our future† We have our USA-mania. It must be limited by the boundaries our reason and sentiment jointly dictate.

    -Jose   Enrique Rodo 
      Ariel (translated1922), pt.5.

  • The country habit has me by the heart, For he's bewitched for ever who has seen, Not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring Flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun.

    -Vita (Victoria Mary) Sackville-West
      The Land,'Winter'.

  • The skull that housed white angels and had vision Of daybreak through the gateways of the mind.

    - Siegfried Louvain Sassoon
      The Heart'sJourney, pt.23,'At the Grave of HenryVaughan'.

  • The notion of a defence that will protect American cities is one that will not be achieved, but it is that goal that supplies the political magic in the President's vision.

    -James Schlesinger
      Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 6 Feb.

  • You can't figure him out like a fact, because to Reagan themainfact was avision† He came fromtheheartland of the country, where people could be down-to-earth yet feel that the sky is the limitnot ashamed of, or cynical about, the American dream.

    - George P(ratt) Shultz
      Of Ronald Reagan.Turmoil andTriumph.

  • Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new: That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do: For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heaven fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations'airy navies grappling in the central blue; Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, Ulysses With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder-storm; Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle- flags were furled In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'Locksley Hall', l.117^28.

  • The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

    - SirAngus FrankJohnstone Wilson
      TheWild Garden.

  • Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is nature's priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his wayattended; At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.

    -William Wordsworth
    c.1802^1803  'Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood', stanza 5 (published1807).

  • Let beeves and home-bred kine partake The sweets of Burn-mill meadow; The swan on still St Mary's Lake Float double, swan and shadow! We will not see them; will not go, To-day, nor yet to-morrow; Enough if in our hearts we know There's such a place asYarrow. BeYarrow stream unseen, unknown; It must, or we shall rue it: We have a vision of our own, Ah! why should we undo it? The treasured dreams of times long past, We'll keep them, winsome Marrow! For when we're there, although 'tis fair, 'Twill be another Yarrow!

    -William Wordsworth
      'Yarrow Unvisited', stanzas 6^7 (published1807).

  • Even so for me a vision sanctified The sway of death; long ere my eyes had seen Thy countenancethe still rapture of thy mien When thou, dear Sister! wert become death's bride: No trace of pain or languor could abide That changeage on thy brow was smoothedthy cold Wan cheek at once was privileged to unfold A loveliness to living youth denied. Oh! if within me hope should e'er decline, The lamp of faith, lost Friend! too faintly burn; The may that heaven-revealing smile of thine, The bright assurance, visibly return: And let my spirit in that power divine Rejoice, as, through that power, it ceased to mourn.

    -William Wordsworth
      'November1836', complete poem (published1837).

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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