"Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over……" — Peter Matthiessen

"Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers."

— Peter Matthiessen

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35 Quotes by Peter Matthiessen

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More Abstractions Quotes

This quote is filed under Abstractions Quotes, one of 74 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions. — Sarah Caldwell
Accordingly, France Had Voltaire, and his school of negative thinkers, and England (or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker… — John Stuart Mill
If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described… — Carl Sagan
Of the many forms of false culture, a premature converse with abstractions is perhaps the most likely to prove fatal… — George Boole
The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He… — Flannery O'Connor
To be well used, creatures and places must be used sympathetically, just as they must be known sympathetically to be… — Wendell Berry
There are no steps to self-realization. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible. You rotate… — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. — Edmund Burke
Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time… — Walt Whitman
We want spiritual principles to be more than beautiful abstractions; we want them to actually transform our lives. — Marianne Williamson
For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or… — Virginia Woolf
For the Warrior of the Light, there are no abstractions. — Paulo Coelho

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