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 Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn.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.

About Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 – April 5, 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher, and onetime CIA agent. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he is the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both nonfiction (The Snow Leopard, 1979,...

More quotations from Peter Matthiessen

In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.

—Peter Matthiessen

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More quotations tagged with “opinions”

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

—Oscar Wilde

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Wisdom is what's left after we've run out of personal opinions.

—Cullen Hightower

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Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

—Albert Einstein

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The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

—Virginia Woolf

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Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

—Bertrand Russell

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History

15 Feb 2014 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

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 Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn.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.