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1 " We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, " But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. "
2 " (He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute "
― Bruce Sterling , Schismatrix
3 " Life roars at us when it wants or needs us to change. Ultimately, change means trans formation, a shifting from one form to another that involves the magic of creation. The trouble with entrenched oppositions is that each side becomes increasingly one-sided and single minded and unable to grow or meaningfully change. In the blindness of fear and the willfulness of abstract beliefs, people forget or reject the unseen yet essential unity that underlies all the oppositions in life. "
― , Why the World Doesn't End: Tales of Renewal in Times of Loss
4 " I wish for all of us the blindness of love that makes us see no faults in the other. "
― Kamand Kojouri
5 " If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality? "
― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch
6 " I hear talk of that slippery slope, and my heart catches for a beat. But there is the musky truth I'm standing in that I can't deny, and it tastes of so much holy. That old way, the narrow line, I see now that was a slippery, saccharine surface where my soul could gain no purchase. For the first time, my feet feel sure beneath me, and that sense is twining its way up from my ankles, racing toward my knees, my thighs, my secret places, my heart. It's in my blood now, and I can't deny it. I can't deny it. I open my eyes, because I could see even through my clutched-closed lids that the darkness is light, that the blindness has given way to searing vision. I can't deny it. "
― Beth Morey , Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul
7 " The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought. "
― Carlos Fuentes , Myself with Others: Selected Essays
8 " And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended. "
― Lord Dunsany , The King of Elfland's Daughter
9 " Every man on earth is sick with the fever of sin, with the blindness of sin and is overcome with its fury. As sins consist mostly of malice and pride, it is necessary to treat everyone who suffers from the malady of sin with kindness and love. This is an important truth, which we often forget. Very often we act in the opposite manner: we add malice to malice by our anger, we oppose pride with pride. Thus, evil grows within us and does not decrease; it is not cured – rather it spreads "
― John of Kronstadt
10 " If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of man serve its own interests. "
11 " When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, like flute notes rising up, like the words of glass speaking. Then there comes a point when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. "
― Anne Spollen , The Shape of Water
12 " Logan looked at her and wondered how someone so beautiful could be so oblivious to their own beauty, how someone so smart could be so foolish to the extent of their own intellect and how someone so loving and compassionate could ever think she wasn’t worthy of love? It was like watching a blind man trapped and wandering aimlessly and helplessly in a scorching hot desert unable to see the small puddle of water that lay just a foot away. The only difference was that she had eyes. Two beautiful ones, yet she could not see. Is that what madness was? Was it to be able to view and appreciate every form of beauty but to be blind to the value and exquisiteness of one’s own? Logan believed in many forms of insanity but he knew in that instant watching her trembling frame on the train tracks that hers, that her illness, surpassed any clinical or psychological term known. Maybe she did suffer from depression or bipolar or schizophrenia. Who knew? All he was certain of in that moment that she suffered from no greater illness than the blindness of the heart. "
― Ali Harper
13 " Most people have the blindness of new-born things - a not-incurable blindness, the sight being there but its use not known. "
― Josephine Winslow Johnson , Now in November
14 " Liao writes with the courage of a man who knows loss and doesn't fear it. There is nothing to make him notice like an official injunction against noticing, nothing to make him listen like official deafness, nothing that drives him to make us see like the blindness that officialdom seeks to impose. "
― Liao Yiwu , The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up
15 " [To think for oneself] is the maxim of a reason never passive. The tendency to such passivity, and therefore to heteronomy of reason, is called prejudice; and the greatest prejudice of all is to represent nature as not subject to the rules that the understanding places at its basis by means of its own essential law, i.e. is superstition. Deliverance from superstition is called enlightenment; because although this name belongs to deliverance from prejudices in general, yet superstition especially (in sensu eminenti) deserves to be called a prejudice. For the blindness in which superstition places us, which it even imposes on us as an obligation, makes the need of being guided by others, and the consequent passive state of our reason, peculiarly noticeable. "
― Immanuel Kant , Critique of Judgment
16 " There is, in fact, no need to drag politics into literary theory: as with South African sport, it has been there from the beginning. I mean by the political no more than the way we organize our social life together, and the power-relations which this involves; and what I have tried to show throughout this book is that the history of modern literary theory is part of the political and ideological history of our epoch. From Percy Bysshe Shelley to Norman N. Holland, literary theory has been indissociably bound up with political beliefs and ideological values. Indeed literary theory is less an object of intellectual enquiry in its own right than a particular perspective in which to view the history of our times. Nor should this be in the least cause for surprise. For any body of theory concerned with human meaning, value, language, feeling and experience will inevitably engage with broader, deeper beliefs about the nature of human individuals and societies, problems of power and sexuality, interpretations of past history, versions of the present and hopes for the future. It is not a matter of regretting that this is so — of blaming literary theory for being caught up with such questions, as opposed to some 'pure' literary theory which might be absolved from them. Such 'pure' literary theory is an academic myth: some of the theories we have examined in this book are nowhere more clearly ideological than in their attempts to ignore history and politics altogether. Literary theories are not to be upbraided for being political, but for being on the whole covertly or unconsciously so — for the blindness with which they offer as a supposedly 'technical', 'self-evident', 'scientific' or 'universal' truth doctrines which with a little reflection can be seen to relate to and reinforce the particular interests of particular groups of people at particular times. "
― Terry Eagleton , Literary Theory: An Introduction