Eyes have long been considered windows to the soul, capturing emotions and revealing truths that words often cannot. Whether reflecting wisdom, curiosity, or beauty, the way we see and are seen through our eyes holds a special place in literature, art, and everyday life. In this collection, we’ve gathered 100 inspiring quotes about eyes that celebrate their power, mystery, and significance. Dive in to explore perspectives that may deepen your appreciation for this remarkable part of the human experience.
1. “The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye.” - Charlotte Brontë
2. “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” - Meister Eckhart
3. “[S]he stood for some moments gazing at the sisters, with affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.” - Charles Dickens
4. “When life gives you lemons, squirt someone in the eye.” - Cathy Guiswite
5. “Can you be happy with the movies, and the ads, and the clothes in the stores, and the doctors, and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them.” - Katherine Dunn
6. “There are brown eyes in the world, after all, as well as blue, and one pair of brown that meant heaven to me as the blue had never done” - E. Nesbit
7. “Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear.We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?” - Leonard Mlodinow
8. “We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
9. “The horse respects and obeys man because its large eyes magnify everything, so man appears much larger than the horse itself.” - Stanisław Lem
10. “When pain brings you down, don't be silly, don't close your eyes and cry, you just might be in the best position to see the sun shine.” - Alanis Morissette
11. “...his eyes lit up and glowed red against the dark bulk of it. A moment they remained so ... then they soared up, phosphorescently opalescent, with a predominance of red, like two sinful dead planets escaping from Hell.” - Jessie Douglas Kerruish
12. “The eyes are one of the most powerful tools a woman can have. With one look, she can relay the most intimate message. After the connection is made, words cease to exist. ” - Jennifer Salaiz
13. “Then love knew it was called love. And when I lifted my eyes to your name, suddenly your heart showed me my way” - Pablo Neruda
14. “Fashion Fact: Most people make the assumption that I wear trendy shades the majority of the time (often indoors) to protect my eyes from the elements. But in fact it's the reverse. I'm protecting the elements from the brilliance of my eyes.” - Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino
15. “So with curious eyes and sick surmiseWe watched him day by day,And wondered if each one of usWould end the self-same way,For none can tell to what red HellHis sightless soul may stray.” - Oscar Wilde
16. “Quiet descended, a silence so consuming that even the drafty corridors ceased whistling. Bog wasn't certain where to look, so he solved the problem by plucking out his eyes and sticking them in a drawer.” - A. Lee Martinez
17. “...and my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world.” - Jean Hatzfeld
18. “La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.” - Julio Cortazar
19. “An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.” - Martin Buber
20. “We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.” - Pierre Simon de Laplace
21. “Your eyes will always be closer to your soul than to any other part of your body except the heart.” - Sorin Cerin
22. “Only in the eyes of love you can find infinity.” - Sorin Cerin
23. “But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat.He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression.” - Arundhati Roy
24. “If you see it's impossible, you may use others' eyes.” - Toba Beta
25. “Majority of women like to fantasize and men like to romanticize. I saw a painful mountain in her eyes.” - Santosh Kalwar
26. “Escape? There is one unwatched way: your eyes. O Beauty! Keep me good that secret gate.” - Wilfred Owen
27. “See not the face..but only the eyes, of the poker face.” - Toba Beta
28. “The Girl With Many EyesOne day in the parkI had quite a surprise.I met a girlwho had many eyes.She was really quite pretty(and also quite shocking!)and I noticed she had a mouth,so we ended up talking.We talked about flowers,and her poetry classes,and the problems she'd haveif she ever wore glasses.It's great to know a girlwho has so many eyes,but you really get wetwhen she breaks down and cries.” - Tim Burton
29. “St. John's eyes, though clear enough in a literal sense, in a figurative one were difficult to fathom. He seemed to use them rather as instruments to search other people's thoughts, than as agents to reveal his own: the which combination of keenness and reserve was considerably more calculated to embarrass than to encourage.” - Charlotte Brontë
30. “Almost nothing need be said when you have eyes.” - Tarjei Vesaas
31. “Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.” - Victor Hugo
32. “The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
33. “Eyes can only capture objects that already seen in mind.And mind can only see things that already written in heart.” - Toba Beta
34. “When darkness falls and eyes stay shutA chain of voices opens up.Let wax not wane give breath to death.p.s. Shhh" -Yvonne Woon(Dead Beautiful)” - Yvonne Woon
35. “My eyes were closed, they're open now” - Damien Rice
36. “A black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love...' His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he has his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.” - Graham Greene
37. “Each time a man looks into your eyes, he is only searching to find himself; for he knows already, that he is part of you” - Jeremy Aldana
38. “If my eyes have pain, I close them; If my body aches, I rest it; If my heart breaks, I mend it; If my soul is lost, I pray for it” - Jeremy Aldana
39. “His eyes were open wounds beneath his heavy brows, a blue as dark as the sea by night.” - George R.R. Martin
40. “The little man gave the big one a look. One of his eyes was green, one was black, and both were cool.” - George R.R. Martin
41. “No - the light in Tamani's eyes was much more than a reflection. It was the fire that melted her anger and devestated her resolve, every single time she saw it.” - Aprilynne Pike
42. “Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.” (p.33)” - Tim Willocks
43. “Eyes skip a low-key profile.” - Toba Beta
44. “People felt themselves watching him even before they knew that there was anything different about him. His eyes made a person think that he heard things that no one else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human.” - Carson McCullers
45. “Basically, I believe the world is a jungle, and if it's not a bit of a jungle in the home, a child cannot possibly be fit to enter the outside world.” - Bette Davis
46. “A King and Queen cannot support a crown with eyes looking down. Their universe expands as far as you can see.” - T.F. Hodge
47. “Those who speak of progression but are afraid of change are self-repressed and therefore unable to reach any further than their eyes can already see.” - Criss Jami
48. “Her eyes were those of someone who's just fallen in love, someone who sees nothing but her lover, someone who has no fear of anything. The eyes of someone who believes that every dream will come true, that reality will move if you just give it a push.” - Banana Yoshimoto
49. “They were a deep emerald green, the exact same color as mine, and they glowed with an intensity I had never witnessed before. A slash of silver crossed each one, the sun's reflection making them sparkle like dancing crystals. The emerald irises appeared to be swirling in circles, creating the illusion that his eyes were never-ending. Flecks of darker emerald clustered around each pupil made my breath catch in my throat. Suddenly, my disheartened mood vanished, almost as if I had never felt sadness before. Something about these eyes held me in place, as if I had found a balance, blanketing me in a cocoon of comfort, free of worries and concerns.” - Markelle Grabo
50. “I peek up at his features, at the crooked grin i want to savor, at the color in his eyes i'd use to paint a million pictures.” - Tahereh Mafi
51. “My mother was teaching me that the inside of something was not necessarily its outside. Always look carefully, she told me. Look with more than your eyes.” - Alice Hoffman
52. “You have two eyes, and two ears, but only one mouth. This is so because you are supposed to look and listen more than you talk.” - Lucca Kaldahl
53. “It's the mind that sees, not eyes.” - Toba Beta
54. “The moment you realize your eyes hurt not because of rubbing them, but because of the tears you wasted, on him.” - A. Kamalei
55. “They were different colors: the right one blue, the left green. And her face in the light of the candle on the table startled me at first, just as it had in the icy night air. After seeing it on the street, I was afraid I had only imagined it: a still, luminous face with a silvery sheen. Finely hewn, with a long, straight nose and a wide mouth, it was nearly identical to another face, which I had photographed years before. Not on a person, bu on the fragment of a frieze I found in some ruins near Verona, The frieze, which depicted a band of musicians, had once been shadowed beneath a cornice high on the temple of Mercury, god of magic. Belonging to one of the musicians, it was a riveting face - like a puzzle that could not be solved - which I had never found, or expected to find, on a living woman.” - Nicholas Christopher
56. “My own eyes try to sleep, but they don't. They stay wide awake as time snarls forward and silence drops down, like measured thought.” - Markus Zusak
57. “The pages and the words are my world, spread out before your eyes and for your hand to touch. Vaguely, I can see you face looking down into me, as I look back. Do you see my eyes?” - Markus Zusak
58. “We always protect our heads, our faces,' he commented as he followed a half-step behind and to her left. It's pure instinct; to shield the eyes. The irony is that the blind have no eyes to protect, and suffer most of their injuries on their legs. But instinct can be blind, too.” - Melinda Cross
59. “How can you fall in love at first sight when you can't even see?” - Melinda Cross
60. “Cassie fumbled helplessly beneath the shade of the ancient oak, still searching for her second shoe.The first had been easy to find, having landed close to where she had kicked it off; and when her hand had finally encountered it, she clutched it to her breast in a gesture of smug triumph. For one brief moment, she felt a twinge of sympathy for the sighted people who would never experience such sweet victory from a task as simple as finding a shoe.” - Melinda Cross
61. “She didn't say anything—at least, not with her mouth. Her eyes told me a different story. The only problem was that they each had a thousand tongues talking, each in a language I didn't speak.” - J.X. Burros
62. “You're a Dark One," said Anton. "All you see in everything is evil, treachery, trickery.""All I do is not close my eyes to them," Edgar retorted. "And that's why I don't trust Zabulon. I distrust him almost as much as I do Gesar. I can even trust you more—you're just another unfortunate chess piece who happens by chance to be painted a different color from me. Does a white pawn hate a black one? No. Especially if the two pawns have their heads down together over a quiet beer or two.""You know," Anton said in a slightly surprised voice, "I just don't understand how you can carry on living if you see the world like that. I'd just go and hang myself.""So you don't have any counterarguments to offer?"Anton took a gulp of beer too. The wonderful thing about this natural Czech beer was that even if you drank lots of it, it still didn't make your head or your body feel heavy... Or was that an illusion?"Not a single one," Anton admitted. "Right now, this very moment, not a single one. But I'm sure you're wrong. It's just difficult to argue about the colors of the rainbow with a blind man. There's something missing in you... I don't know what exactly. But it's something very important, and without it you're more helpless than a blind man.” - Sergei Lukyanenko
63. “Calvin said, "Do you know that this is the first time I've seen you without your glasses?""I'm blind as a bat without them. I'm near-sighted, like father.""Well, you know what, you've got dream-boat eyes," Calvin said. "Listen, you go right on wearing your glasses. I don't think I want anybody else to see what gorgeous eyes you have.” - Madeleine L'Engle
64. “Lasik surgery has evolved. Remarkably, it has merged with cataract surgery to give birth to a new procedure called Prelex.” - Rajesh Khanna
65. “...who would have known the dark eyes staring into mine would become our children's eyes...?” - John Geddes
66. “If eyes are windows to the soul, then tears are heavens rain.” - Anthony Liccione
67. “Blue is the most common eye color in Oria Province, but there is something different about his eyes and I'm not sure what it is. More depth? I wonder what he sees when he looks at me. If he seems to have depth to me, do I seem shallow and transparent to him?” - Ally Condie
68. “Any other questions?""Just one," I say. "What color are your eyes?" I want to know what he thinks, how he sees himself - the real Ky - when he dares to look."Blue," he says sounding surprised, "they've always been blue.""Not to me.""What do they look like to you?" he says puzzled, amused. Not looking at my mouth anymore, looking into my eyes."Lots of colors," I say. "At first I thought they were brown. Once I thought they were green...""What are they now?" he asks. He widens his eyes a little, leans closer, lets me look as long and deep as I want."Well?""Everything," I tell him, "They're everything.” - Ally Condie
69. “We don't take orders from you, Sergeant." Quain said. "Your man tried to assassinate-""He isn't mine. My man has eyes that change color with the seasons.” - Maria V. Snyder
70. “If you desire the path of sincerity, develop a love for obscurity. Flee from the clatter and clinks of fame. Be like the roots of a tree; it keeps the tree upright and gives it life, but it itself is hidden underneath the earth and eyes cannot see it.” - Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak
71. “Observe the eyes, for they are the windows to her soul.” - Habeeb Akande
72. “Behind these eyesthere is a girl trapped withinher pain – a girl feeling all the emotionsof anger and sadness.She’s fighting for a way out.” (In her eyes, p. 39)” - Chimnese Davids
73. “I couldn't tell what colour her eyes were. They were wet and dark and shining, like pools of deep, still water. For a second I thought I could see pictures in them, like I was looking right inside her to where her memories were. She smiled, and I wondered if she knew what I'd seen or if she could see the pictures I kept hidden inside myself.” - Glenda Millard
74. “... and all we knew about her that we didn't know the night before was that she had eyes like pansies and skin like the moon.” - Glenda Millard
75. “Ci vuole sempre la disgrazia per aprire gli occhi alla gente” - Mauro Corona
76. “If the eyes are the window to the soul, then Edward's in trouble 'cause no one is home.” - Laurell K. Hamilton
77. “Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.” - Allen Ginsberg
78. “They no longer wanted to entice anyone; all they wanted was to catch a glimpse for as long as possible of the reflected glory in the great eyes of Odysseus” - Franz Kafka
79. “I loved your eyes first,” I told him , repeating his words from a few weeks ago back to him, because it was true, and because we were two halves of a whole—we had been all along, and he’d been so clever to know it right away. I used to think it was insanity, but now I was beginning to think that it was pure brilliance. “I see it, too, James. I see the other half of my soul in you.” - R.K. Lilley
80. “...did you know that in your eyes there are bright flecks of green and orange - and that they are lovely?...” - John Geddes A Familiar Rain
81. “Those eyes of his just look up at me, pupils dilated in the diffused lights of the room. Wide, black pools, seeking out galaxies.” - Neal Shusterman
82. “She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.” - Ernest Hemingway
83. “Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?” - Walker Percy
84. “Lovers' language, give me an exact and poetic comparison to say what those eyes of Capitu were like. No image comes to mind that doesn't offend against the rules of good style, to say what they were and what they did to me. Undertow eyes? Why not? Undertow. That's the notion that the new expression put in my head. They held some kind of mysterious, active fluid, a force that dragged one in, like the undertow of a wave retreating from the shore on stormy days. So as not to be dragged in, I held onto anything around them, her ears, her arms, her hair spread about her shoulders; but as soon as I returned to the pupils of her eyes again, the wave emerging from them grew towards me, deep and dark, threatening to envelop me, draw me in and swallow me up.” - Machado de Assis
85. “A heartful mind can always see better than mindless eyes” - Munia Khan
86. “He had to keep busy; he had to keep moving so that the sinews connected behind his eyes did not slip loose and spin his eyes to the interior of his skull where the scenes waited for him.” - Leslie Marmon Silko
87. “It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.” - Edith Wharton
88. “He had a thousand-year-old stare.” - Louise Erdrich
89. “But if you close your eyes,does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?” - Bastille Pompeii
90. “The men laugh at the witty line, but it is not a belly laugh. Beasley's mouth is in a wide smile, but his eyes do not laugh, for there is little reason for joy. And if eyes are indeed mirrors of the soul, then they reflect an infinite sadness. I look away, afraid of what mine might reflect” - Mumia Abu-Jamal
91. “Dimitri no dijo nada cuando fue su turno, pero como siempre, sus ojos hablaban por él.” - Richelle Mead
92. “It was those eyes as much as anything that had earned him his reputation as a man to be reckoned with. When he stared at a person, clear and unwavering, men grew uncomfortable. Women positively shivered.” - Julia Quinn
93. “To hear never-heard sounds, To see never-seen colors and shapes, To try to understand the imperceptible Power pervading the world; To fly and find pure ethereal substances That are not of matter But of that invisible soul pervading reality. To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul; To be a lantern in the darkness Or an umbrella in a stormy day; To feel much more than know. To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain; To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon; To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves; To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching. To be a smile on the face of a woman And shine in her memory As a moment saved without planning.” - Dejan Stojanovic
94. “Close your eyes and you will see your dreams, open them and you will see obstacles.” - Gavriil Stiharul
95. “The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.” - Elie Wiesel
96. “If the pirate with a scarf had been more poetically minded he’d have thought that her eyes were like a thousand emeralds, glittering in a far-off pirate treasure chest. But he wasn’t, so he just thought that she had really really green eyes, a bit like seaweed.” - Gideon Defoe
97. “She had curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that were very pretty and very good.” - Charles Dickens
98. “Anna Petrovna: Do you know what, Kolya? Try and sing, laugh, get angry, as you once did... You stay in, we'll laugh and drink fruit liqueur and we'll drive away your depression in a flash. I'll sing if you like. Or else let's go and sit in the dark in your study as we used to, and you'll tell me about your depression... You have such suffering eyes. I'll look into them and cry, and we'll both feel better.” - Anton Chekhov
99. “There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.” - Marilynne Robinson
100. “I might be a great liar, but I am not sure I can lie to those striking eyes.” - M.F. Moonzajer
