blindness

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

Mais les yeux sont aveugles. Il faut chercher avec le couer. (But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.)

            “Beliefs can easily cause us to become blind to the obvious.  Recent research on ‘inattentional blindness’ has shown that even minor tweaks to one’s expectations can cause a form of blindness.  A simple experiment developed by University of Illinois psychologist Daniel Simons provided a dramatic demonstration of this effect.  …

            Simon’s experiment consists of a twenty-five second video clip of six people playing a basketball game.  Three are dressed in white T-shirts and three in black T-shirts.  The white team is passing a basketball amongst themselves, and the black team is doing likewise.  During the game, a person dressed in a black gorilla suit calmly walks into the middle of the game, beats its chest, and then walks off.  The gorilla is not understated or camouflaged – it’s blatantly obvious.  And yet the majority of people viewing the clip do not see the gorilla provided they’re given a very simple instruction:  count the number of basketballs tossed between the members wearing white T-shirts.  This minor deflection of attention is enough to cause complete blindness to something as obvious as a gorilla.  The power of deflecting attention is well known to stage magicians, who specialize in creating such illusions.”

For a boy, I had been doing extraordinary things, which caused much wonder. Before I could walk, I could play on the piano, with one finger, any tunes that I heard, then, gradually, with all fingers, even the complex melodies played by blind Mr. Maynard, who, to me, was the greatest man in all the world.
Mr. Maynard lived in the dark but walked and talked with God in the Light. And what the soul of Creation told his Soul, he told me – and I walked and talked with God in those early days in His wonderlands of Peat Meadow and the huge oaks down in Bachelder’s wilds where nobody went but me, for no one else in all My World heard what I heard there – nor saw what I saw there – so it was mine alone, all that glory just mine alone.

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

Hate and mistrust are the children of blindness.

Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind; and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.

Let us sit and mock the good housewife Fortune from her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be bestowed equally, I would we could do so; for her benefits are mightily misplaced; and the bountiful blind girl doth most mistake in her gifts to women. "Tis true; for those that she makes fair she scarce makes honest; and those that she makes honest she makes very ill-favouredly. Nay, now thou goest from Fortune's office to Nature's. Fortune reigns in gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of Nature.