A Quote by John Adams

Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination - everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.

John Adams

Quote Topics

Imagination Broke Charm Ear Ever Everything Eye Hold How Ignorant Lay Luther Simple Spell Which Wonder

Quote Author

John Adams
American - President
October 30, 1735 - July 4, 1826

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green?’ How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?

Stan Brakhage

Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm.

Leo Strauss

Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.

Louis Aragon

Stan Brakhage

Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you know your archetypes - and not just yours, if you know how to perceive the world in archetypes, through archetypes - everything changes. Everything. Because you have two things: you can see through one eye which is impersonal, and through the other, which is personal. That's the way the game is written down here.

Caroline Myss

That is the great fact which you ought to remember. We are the children of the Almighty, we are sparks of the infinite, divine fire. How can we be nothings? We are everything, ready to do everything, we can do everything, and man must do everything.

Swami Vivekananda

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

Blaise Pascal

All social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have. been tolerated; forgetful that they themselves perhaps tolerate other inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as monstrous as what they have at last learnt to condemn.

John Stuart Mill

That ignorant confidence in one's self and one's future, which comes in life's first dawn, has a sort of mournful charm in experienced eyes, who know how much it all amounts to.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

There is a spell in mediaeval Art which has had power to bewitch some people into trying, or wishing to try, or fancying that they wish to try or making believe to fancy that they wish to try, to bring back the Middle Ages.

Goldwin Smith

Love doesn't have to be perfect. Even perfect, it is still the best thing there is, for the simple reason that it is the most common and constant truth of all, of all life, all law and order, the very thing which holds everything together, which permits everything to move along in time and be its wonderful or ordinary self.

William Saroyan

See that I am God. See that I am in everything. See that I do everything. See that I have never stopped ordering my works, nor ever shall, eternally. See that I lead everything on to the conclusion I ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it. How can anything be amiss?

Julian of Norwich

My mother was a dominant force in my life. She had a very specific idea about education, which was: you should know everything about everything. It was quite simple. There was no exclusivity, and there really was no judgment, which is a good thing for someone who still thinks of themselves as a very basic American.

Twyla Tharp

I shut up everything inside. Everything." Words ground out through clenched teeth. "I thought if I could hold it, just hold it, it would be fine. But it's not." "Why?" she asked. "Why are you losing control so badly?" The answer, when it came, broke Sascha's heart. "Hawke." It was an almost soundless whisper. "Oh, Sienna." She stroked her hand over the girl's hair, even as her mind worked at piercing speed. "Has it been cumulative?" Sienna nodded. "The second I met him, everything crumbled, my shields, my conditioning, everything!