The World I Live In quotes

In any case, it is pleasant to have something to talk about that no one else has monopolized; it is like making a new path in the trackless woods, blazing the trail where no foot has pressed before.

I am glad to take you by the hand and lead you along an untrodden way into a world where the hand is supreme.

But at the very outset we encounter a difficulty. You are so accustomed to light, I fear you will stumble when I try to guide you through the land of darkness and silence. The blind are not supposed to be the best of guides.

If you will follow me patiently, you will find that "there's a sound so fine, nothing lives 'twixt it and silence," and that there is more meant in things than meets the eye.

My hand is to me what your hearing and sight together are to you.

In large measure we travel the same highways, read the same books, speak the same language, yet our experiences are different. All my comings and goings turn on the hand as on a pivot.

In large measure we travel the same highways, read the same books, speak the same language, yet our experiences are different. All my comings and goings turn on the hand as on a pivot.

It is the hand that binds me to the world of men and women.

The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter.

All my comings and goings turn on the hand as on a pivot. It is the hand that binds me to the world of men and women.

The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter.

With the dropping of a little word from another's hand into mine, a slight flutter of the fingers, began the intelligence, the joy, the fullness of my life.

… leaves or lifting sweetly out of the meadow-grass, the clear, firm outline of face and limb, the smooth arch of a horse's neck and the velvety touch of his nose—all these, and a thousand resultant combinations, which take shape in my mind, constitute my world.

Ideas make the world we live in, and impressions furnish ideas.

My world is built of touch-sensations, devoid of physical colour and sound; but without colour and sound it breathes and throbs with life.

Remember that you, dependent on your sight, do not realize how many things are tangible. All palpable things are mobile or rigid, solid or liquid, big or small, warm or cold, and these qualities are variously modified.

The coolness of a water-lily rounding into bloom is different from the coolness of an evening wind in summer, and different again from the coolness of the rain that soaks into the hearts of growing things and gives them life and body.

The velvet of the rose is not that of a ripe peach or of a baby's dimpled cheek. The hardness of the rock is to the hardness of wood what a man's deep bass is to a woman's voice when it is low.

That is what it means. To escape this moralizing you should ask, "How does the straight line feel?" It feels, as I suppose it looks, straight—a dull thought drawn out endlessly.

Eloquence to the touch resides not in straight lines, but in unstraight lines, or in many curved and straight lines together.

They appear and disappear, are now deep, now shallow, now broken off or lengthened or swelling. They rise and sink beneath my fingers, they are full of sudden starts and pauses, and their variety is inexhaustible and wonderful.

for at least every object appears to my fingers standing solidly right side up, and is not an inverted image on the retina which, I understand, your brain is at infinite though unconscious labour to set back on its feet.

A tangible object passes complete into my brain with the warmth of life upon it, and occupies the same place that it does in space; for, without egotism, the mind is as large as the universe.

When I think of hills, I think of the upward strength I tread upon.

But my mind is full of associations, sensations, theories, and with them it constructs the house. The process reminds me of the building of Solomon's temple, where was neither saw, nor hammer, nor any tool heard while the stones were being laid one upon another.

The silent worker is imagination which decrees reality out of chaos.

Without imagination what a poor thing my world would be! My garden would be a silent patch of earth strewn with sticks of a variety of shapes and smells.

The process reminds me of the building of Solomon's temple, where was neither saw, nor hammer, nor any tool heard while the stones were being laid one upon another. The silent worker is imagination which decrees reality out of chaos.

Without imagination what a poor thing my world would be!

My garden would be a silent patch of earth strewn with sticks of a variety of shapes and smells.

How different dear Mr. Hutton's hand was from its dull, insensate image! To me the cast lacks the very form of the hand. Of the many casts in Mr. Hutton's collection I did not recognize any, not even my own.

But a loving hand I never forget.

I remember in my fingers the large hands of Bishop Brooks, brimful of tenderness and a strong man's joy. If you were deaf and blind, and could have held Mr.

and so, too, any description I might give would fail to make you acquainted with a friendly hand which my fingers have often folded about, and which my affection translates to my memory.

I cannot describe hands under any class or type; there is no democracy of hands.

Some hands tell me that they do everything with the maximum of bustle and noise. Other hands are fidgety and unadvised, with nervous, fussy fingers which indicate a nature sensitive to the little pricks of daily life.

Other hands are fidgety and unadvised, with nervous, fussy fingers which indicate a nature sensitive to the little pricks of daily life. Sometimes I recognize with foreboding the kindly but stupid hand of one who tells with many words news that is no news.

I have met a bishop with a jocose hand, a humourist with a hand of leaden gravity, a man of pretentious valour with a timorous hand, and a quiet, apologetic man with a fist of iron.

When I was a little girl I was taken to see[A] a woman who was blind and paralysed. I shall never forget how she held out her small, trembling hand and pressed sympathy into mine. My eyes fill with tears as I think of her.

By his impatient jerk I know he has argument ready for some one. I have felt him start as a sudden recollection or a new idea shot through his mind. I have felt grief in his hand.

I have felt his soul wrap itself in darkness majestically as in a garment.

Another friend has positive, emphatic hands which show great pertinacity of opinion. She is the only person I know who emphasizes her spelled words and accents them as she emphasizes and accents her spoken words when I read her lips.

I like this varied emphasis better than the monotonous pound of unmodulated people who hammer their meaning into my palm.

Some hands, when they clasp yours, beam and bubble over with gladness.

They throb and expand with life. Strangers have clasped my hand like that of a long-lost sister. Other people shake hands with me as if with the fear that I may do them mischief.

I have clasped the hands of some rich people that spin not and toil not, and yet are not beautiful.

Beneath their soft, smooth roundness what a chaos of undeveloped character!

I am sure there is no hand comparable to the physician's in patient skill, merciful gentleness and splendid certainty. No wonder that Ruskin finds in the sure strokes of the surgeon the perfection of control and delicate precision for the artist to emulate.

Now and again I touch a fine, graceful, supple-wristed hand which spells with the same beauty and distinction that you must see in the handwriting of some highly cultivated people. I wish you could see how prettily little children spell in my hand.

They are wild flowers of humanity, and their finger motions wild flowers of speech.

All this is my private science of palmistry, and when I tell your fortune it is by no mysterious intuition or gipsy witchcraft, but by natural, explicable recognition of the embossed character in your hand.

All this is my private science of palmistry, and when I tell your fortune it is by no mysterious intuition or gipsy witchcraft, but by natural, explicable recognition of the embossed character in your hand.

Not only is the hand as easy to recognize as the face, but it reveals its secrets more openly and unconsciously.

People control their countenances, but the hand is under no such restraint. It relaxes and becomes listless when the spirit is low and dejected; the muscles tighten when the mind is excited or the heart glad;

The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of thee."

Blessed be the hand! Thrice blessed be the hands that work!

I may not dream of heaven because it is possible that I may never go there. Yet a venturesome spirit impels me to use words of sight and sound whose meaning I can guess only from analogy and fancy.

This hazardous game is half the delight, the frolic, of daily life.

I glow as I read of splendours which the eye alone can survey. Allusions to moonbeams and clouds do not emphasize the sense of my affliction: they carry my soul beyond affliction's narrow actuality.

This hazardous game is half the delight, the frolic, of daily life. I glow as I read of splendours which the eye alone can survey.

Allusions to moonbeams and clouds do not emphasize the sense of my affliction: they carry my soul beyond affliction's narrow actuality.

Critics delight to tell us what we cannot do.

They declare that the very sensations we have from the sense of touch are "vicarious," as though our friends felt the sun for us!

They deny a priori what they have not seen and I have felt.

Some brave doubters have gone so far even as to deny my existence. In order, therefore, that I may know that I exist, I resort to Descartes's method: "I think, therefore I am."

Necessity gives to the eye a precious power of seeing, and in the same way it gives a precious power of feeling to the whole body.

Sometimes it seems as if the very substance of my flesh were so many eyes looking out at will upon a world new created every day.

The silence and darkness which are said to shut me in, open my door most hospitably to countless sensations that distract, inform, admonish, and amuse.

It is not for me to say whether we see best with the hand or the eye.

I only know that the world I see with my fingers is alive, ruddy, and satisfying.

Touch brings the blind many sweet certainties which our more fortunate fellows miss, because their sense of touch is uncultivated. When they look at things, they put their hands in their pockets.

I have laughed over the creak of new shoes and the clatter of a stout maid performing a jig in the kitchen. One day, in the dining-room of an hotel, a tactual dissonance arrested my attention.

I sat still and listened with my feet.

I found that two waiters were walking back and forth, but not with the same gait. A band was playing, and I could feel the music-waves along the floor.

I have touched the tiger only in a museum, where he is as harmless as a lamb. I have, however, heard him talk by putting my hand on the bars of his cage.

I have touched several lions in the flesh, and felt them roar royally, like a cataract over rocks.

To continue, I know the plop of liquid in a pitcher. So if I spill my milk, I have not the excuse of ignorance.

If vibration and motion combine in my touch for any length of time, the earth seems to run away while I stand still. When I step off the train, the platform whirls round, and I find it difficult to walk steadily.

Every atom of my body is a vibroscope.

But my sensations are not infallible. I reach out, and my fingers meet something furry, which jumps about, gathers itself together as if to spring, and acts like an animal. I pause a moment for caution.

Judging from the large use of the word, taste appears to be the most important of all the senses. Taste governs the great and small conventions of life.

Certainly the language of the senses is full of contradictions, and my fellows who have five doors to their house are not more surely at home in themselves than I.

May I not, then, be excused if this account of my sensations lacks precision?

Softly the ocean of grass, moss, and flowers rolls surge upon surge across the earth. Curtains of foliage drape the bare branches. Great trees make ready in their sturdy hearts to receive again birds which occupy their spacious chambers to the south and west.

Nay, there is no place so lowly that it may not lodge some happy creature.

The meadow brook undoes its icy fetters with rippling notes, gurgles, and runs free. And all this is wrought in less than two months to the music of nature's orchestra, in the midst of balmy incense.

Once having been felt, these loved voices rustle, buzz, hum, flutter, and ripple in my thought forever, an undying part of happy memories.

Between my experiences and the experiences of others there is no gulf of mute space which I may not bridge.

For I have endlessly varied, instructive contacts with all the world, with life, with the atmosphere whose radiant activity enfolds us all. The thrilling energy of the all-encasing air is warm and rapturous.

The rain of spring is brisk, fragrant, charged with life-giving warmth. I welcome it delightedly as it visits the earth, enriches the streams, waters the hills abundantly, makes the furrows soft with showers for the seed, elicits a perfume which I cannot breathe deep enough.

Spring rain is beautiful, impartial, lovable.

With pearly drops it washes every leaf on tree and bush, ministers equally to salutary herbs and noxious growths, searches out every living thing that needs its beneficence.

I doubt if there is any sensation arising from sight more delightful than the odours which filter through sun-warmed, wind-tossed branches, or the tide of scents which swells, subsides, rises again wave on wave, filling the wide world with invisible sweetness.

A whiff of the universe makes us dream of worlds we have never seen, recalls in a flash entire epochs of our dearest experience.

I never smell daisies without living over again the ecstatic mornings that my teacher and I spent wandering in the fields, while I learned new words and the names of things.

I never smell daisies without living over again the ecstatic mornings that my teacher and I spent wandering in the fields, while I learned new words and the names of things.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived.

The odour of fruits wafts me to my Southern home, to my childish frolics in the peach orchard. Other odours, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief.

Touch sensations are permanent and definite. Odours deviate and are fugitive, changing in their shades, degrees, and location. There is something else in odour which gives me a sense of distance.

I should call it horizon—the line where odour and fancy meet at the farthest limit of scent.

Smell gives me more idea than touch or taste of the manner in which sight and hearing probably discharge their functions. Touch seems to reside in the object touched, because there is a contact of surfaces.

None but the halt and the blind need fear my skill in pursuit; for there are other things besides water, stale trails, confusing cross tracks to put me at fault. Nevertheless, human odours are as varied and capable of recognition as hands and faces.

The dear odours of those I love are so definite, so unmistakable, that nothing can quite obliterate them.

If many years should elapse before I saw an intimate friend again, I think I should recognize his odour instantly in the heart of Africa, as promptly as would my brother that barks.

Once, long ago, in a crowded railway station, a lady kissed me as she hurried by. I had not touched even her dress.

But she left a scent with her kiss which gave me a glimpse of her.

The years are many since she kissed me. Yet her odour is fresh in my memory.

I know that if there were no odours for me I should still possess a considerable part of the world.

Novelties and surprises would abound, adventures would thicken in the dark.

In my classification of the senses, smell is a little the ear's inferior, and touch is a great deal the eye's superior. I find that great artists and philosophers agree with me in this. Diderot says:

It has very many sweet beauties which the eyes alone can comprehend not, either by strong or tempered light; only the hand by touching them finds them out."

Hold out your hands to feel the luxury of the sunbeams.

Press the soft blossoms against your cheek, and finger their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens, "inhale great draughts of space," wonder, wonder at the wind's unwearied activity.

I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light, but who see nothing in wood, sea, or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books.

What a witless masquerade is this seeing!

It were better far to sail forever in the night of blindness, with sense and feeling and mind, than to be thus content with the mere act of seeing.

The calamity of the blind is immense, irreparable. But it does not take away our share of the things that count—service, friendship, humour, imagination, wisdom.

It is the secret inner will that controls one's fate.

We are capable of willing to be good, of loving and being loved, of thinking to the end that we may be wiser. We possess these spirit-born forces equally with all God's children. Therefore we, too, see the lightnings and hear the thunders of Sinai.

The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction.

History is but a mode of imagining, of making us see civilizations that no longer appear upon the earth.

Some of the most significant discoveries in modern science owe their origin to the imagination of men who had neither accurate knowledge nor exact instruments to demonstrate their beliefs.

Our blindness changes not a whit the course of inner realities.

Of us it is as true as it is of the seeing that the most beautiful world is always entered through the imagination.

If you wish to be something that you are not,—something fine, noble, good,—you shut your eyes, and for one dreamy moment you are that which you long to be.

The infinite wonders of the universe are revealed to us in exact measure as we are capable of receiving them.

The keenness of our vision depends not on how much we can see, but on how much we feel.

Nor yet does mere knowledge create beauty. Nature sings her most exquisite songs to those who love her.

The keenness of our vision depends not on how much we can see, but on how much we feel. Nor yet does mere knowledge create beauty.

Nature sings her most exquisite songs to those who love her.

She does not unfold her secrets to those who come only to gratify their desire of analysis, to gather facts, but to those who see in her manifold phenomena suggestions of lofty, delicate sentiments.

The utmost bound to which my thought will go with clearness is the horizon of my mind. From this horizon I imagine the one which the eye marks.

Touch cannot bridge distance,—it is fit only for the contact of surfaces,—but thought leaps the chasm.

For this reason I am able to use words descriptive of objects distant from my senses. I have felt the rondure of the infant's tender form. I can apply this perception to the landscape and to the far-off hills.

I made the sign, and my mother knew I wanted ice-cream. I "thought" and desired in my fingers.

If I had made a man, I should certainly have put the brain and soul in his finger-tips.

From reminiscences like these I conclude that it is the opening of the two faculties, freedom of will, or choice, and rationality, or the power of thinking from one thing to another, which makes it possible to come into being first as a child, afterwards …

Then consciousness first existed for me. Thus it was not the sense of touch that brought me knowledge. It was the awakening of my soul that first rendered my senses their value, their cognizance of objects, names, qualities, and properties.

Thought made me conscious of love, joy, and all the emotions.

I was eager to know, then to understand, afterward to reflect on what I knew and understood, and the blind impetus, which had before driven me hither and thither at the dictates of my sensations, vanished forever.

Our impressions grow and change unnoticed, so that what we suppose we thought as children may be quite different from what we actually experienced in our childhood. I only know that after my education began the world which came within my reach was all alive.

I spelled to my blocks and my dogs.

I sympathized with plants when the flowers were picked, because I thought it hurt them, and that they grieved for their lost blossoms.

In either sphere self-knowledge is the condition and the limit of our consciousness. That is why, perhaps, many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience.

They look within themselves—and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves, either.

However that may be, I came later to look for an image of my emotions and sensations in others. I had to learn the outward signs of inward feelings.

As I read and study, I find that this is what the rest of the race has done.

Man looks within himself and in time finds the measure and the meaning of the universe.

The blind child—the deaf-blind child—has inherited the mind of seeing and hearing ancestors—a mind measured to five senses.

We cannot imagine even in dreams an object which has no counterpart in reality. Ghosts always resemble somebody, and if they do not appear themselves, their presence is indicated by circumstances with which we are perfectly familiar.

During sleep we enter a strange, mysterious realm which science has thus far not explored.

Beyond the border-line of slumber the investigator may not pass with his common-sense rule and test. Sleep with softest touch locks all the gates of our physical senses and lulls to rest the conscious will—the disciplinarian of our waking thoughts.

I finger the pages, I bend over them lovingly, the tears fall on my hands. I shut the book quickly as the thought passes through my mind, "The print will be all rubbed out if I get it wet."

Yet there is no print tangible on the page!

This morning I thought that I awoke. I was certain that I had overslept. I seized my watch, and sure enough, it pointed to an hour after my rising time. I sprang up in the greatest hurry, knowing that breakfast was ready.

Birds flew into the houses for safety, and those which winter had overtaken lay on the snow with wings spread in vain flight. At last the foliage and blossoms fell at the feet of Winter.

The petals of the flowers were turned to rubies and sapphires. The leaves froze into emeralds.

The trees moaned and tossed their branches as the frost pierced them through bark and sap, pierced into their very roots. I shivered myself awake, and with a tumult of joy I breathed the many sweet morning odours wakened by the summer sun.

His eyes were hot. His nostrils were large and wet. His lips moved horribly. I knew it was a tiger, a real live tiger, and that I should be devoured—my little bird and I. I do not know what happened after that.

The next important thing seldom happens in dreams.

Some time earlier I had a dream which made a vivid impression upon me. My aunt was weeping because she could not find me.

Now I seldom spell on my fingers, and it is still rarer for others to spell into my hand. My mind acts independent of my physical organs.

I am delighted to be thus endowed, if only in sleep; for then my soul dons its winged sandals and joyfully joins the throng of happy beings who dwell beyond the reaches of bodily sense.

The moral inconsistency of dreams is glaring. Mine grow less and less accordant with my proper principles. I am nightly hurled into an unethical medley of extremes. I must either defend another to the last drop of my blood or condemn him past all repenting.

This beauteous vision strengthens my conviction that the world which the mind builds up out of countless subtle experiences and suggestions is fairer than the world of the senses. The splendour of the sunset my friends gaze at across the purpling hills is wonderful.

But the sunset of the inner vision brings purer delight because it is the worshipful blending of all the beauty that we have known and desired.

I believe that I am more fortunate in my dreams than most people; for as I think back over my dreams, the pleasant ones seem to predominate, although we naturally recall most vividly and tell most eagerly the grotesque and fantastic adventures in Slumberland.

It dances round me with merry measure and darts hither and thither in happy abandon. Sudden, sweet fancies spring forth from every nook and corner, and delightful surprises meet me at every turn.

A happy dream is more precious than gold and rubies.

I like to think that in dreams we catch glimpses of a life larger than our own. We see it as a little child, or as a savage who visits a civilized nation. Thoughts are imparted to us far above our ordinary thinking.

We see it as a little child, or as a savage who visits a civilized nation. Thoughts are imparted to us far above our ordinary thinking. Feelings nobler and wiser than any we have known thrill us between heart-beats.

For one fleeting night a princelier nature captures us, and we become as great as our aspirations.

I daresay we return to the little world of our daily activities with as distorted a half-memory of what we have seen as that of the African who visited England, and afterwards said he had been in a huge hill which carried him over great …

but the vassals of thought would not rally to my standard. Each had his arm round the waist of a fair partner, and I know not what wild tunes "put life and mettle into their heels." There was nothing to do.

I looked about helplessly upon my great retinue, and realized that it is not the possession of a thing but the ability to use it which is of value.

I settled back in my chair to watch the pageant. It was rather pleasant sitting there, "idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean," watching my own thoughts at play.

An antic jester in green and gold led the dance. The guests followed no order or precedent. No two thoughts were related to each other even by the fortieth cousinship. There was not so much as an international alliance between them.

Each thought behaved like a newly created poet.

Shut your eyes, and see them come—the knights and ladies of my revel.

The rest of the company began to nod, and I felt drowsy myself. To put an end to the solemn gyrations, a troop of fairies mercifully waved poppies over us all, the masque faded, my head fell, and I started.

Sleep had wakened me.

At my elbow I found my old friend Bottom.