Top 80 Gaze Quotes

In Sufi terms, there are two very interesting notions of transcendence. One is to gaze out at the universe and to comprehend that what you see out there reflects what you are. The other one is to look inside yourself and recognise that the universe is present there.

In lots of ways, I’ve been trying to tell stories this way since I started writing plays: a female-centered story with queer, Latinx gaze.

A woman director is not obliged to make a feminist film. She can make what she wants, a thriller, an action film, a comedy, or whatever, but hopefully, she will be informed by a gaze that is female.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Growing up, I was taught that a woman should lower her gaze so that men could never know her thoughts. The so-called modesty of Arab women is, in fact, a war tactic.

I don’t have the time or the desire to gaze at my navel.

Every so often, we all gaze into the abyss. It’s a depressing fact of life that eventually the clock expires; eventually the sand in the hourglass runs out. It’s the leaving behind of everything that matters to us that hurts the most.

I’ve always been very forward-looking, and it was actually kind of difficult to turn my gaze backwards to look at comics history.

To attempt this would be like seeing without eyes or directing the gaze of knowledge behind one’s own eye. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point.

In the street, the gaze of desire is furtive or menacing.

Enjoy the fashions, read the good articles, and when you feel threatened, turn your mental gaze inward, but keep your eyes on the road, or you won‘t know where you are going. Have a practice or discipline that lets you be in touch with your inner self, your soul.

As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing in this tradition, the Orientalizing Western gaze is something you have to constantly push against as well as compromise with.

Pope Francis tells us who he is by pointing to Caravaggio’s St. Matthew: ‘Here, this is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze.’ He is telling us that he has experienced the same rush of speechless wonder and graced love Caravaggio depicts in his painting.

You can’t gaze in the crystal ball and see the future. What the Internet is going to be in the future is what society makes it.

My work has always been about not being conventional and male gaze is convention.

After a prosperous, but to me very wearisome, voyage, we came at last into port. Immediately on landing I got together my few effects; and, squeezing myself through the crowd, went into the nearest and humblest inn which first met my gaze.

It’s so important to see everything through every gaze and the female gaze in terms of sex is not something we have seen much of. Let’s reassert that balance!

I think that it’s our job to sort of band together and say, ‘OK, what are the ways the male gaze has seeped into your brain and is affecting the way you treat yourself? Let’s work together to eliminate that.’

Ninety per cent of what we look at is the male gaze. They don’t see themselves anymore.

Young action heroines feel in service of male gaze, rather than being the full complexity of a human being.

I discovered that silent film is almost an advantage. You just have to think of the feeling for it to show. No lines pollute it. It doesn’t take much – a gaze, an eyelash flutter – for the emotion to be vivid.

I loved having a fan appreciate my style of play, but nothing in the world is more gratifying than having 24 guys gaze at you adoringly for quite assertively scoring a run at the expense of a member of the other team.

I was in a band in the ’90s called Bikini Kill, and we were so freaked out about documentation then, and there was the whole thing, not just about the male gaze, but that people were going to misrepresent you… a kind fear of the mainstream that a lot of us had.

Our computers have become windows through which we can gaze upon a world that is virtually without horizons or boundaries.

As an artist, there are times when you need to take a leap of faith… For me, it’s important that the gaze is correct.

She gave up beauty in her tender youth, gave all her hope and joy and pleasant ways; she covered up her eyes lest they should gaze on vanity, and chose the bitter truth.

I think a lot of style is about attitude – posture, deportment, gaze and confidence. I saw that in my mum. She was a cleaner when we were growing up, but she had this stylish presence I admired.

The whole kind of post-World War I settlement that formed the modern Middle East is in danger of collapsing, and we can – we, the United States, you know, the preeminent power in the world – we can say that we want to ignore that, but how long can we avert our gaze? And how long can we stay out?

In the drag community it’s mostly women in the audience, even for burlesque. I think people look at strippping as a male gaze thing and I think the actual neo-classical burlesque community is more about women supporting women and their creativity, along with freedom of expression.

I think my movies are very much about the female gaze… But it’s not going to happen magically if you’re a woman. It’s still something you have to deconstruct, but it’s not something you have to be vigilant about.

That penetrating gaze, that intelligence; it’s hard not to be anthropomorphic when you’re looking at a great ape – at any primate – but especially with gorillas. They’re just so magnificent.

Coldplay‘s ‘Hymn for the Weekend‘ video featuring Beyonce is already caught in a heated conversation about cultural appreciation of Indian religion and culture versus cultural appropriation of that culture for the western gaze.

Any talk of ‘craft‘ makes me laugh. My music looks outward; it does not gaze upon itself in admiration. Artisanal is for cheesemakers. I don’t know anything about music theory. Every time I approach my guitar, it’s like the first time. There’s no craft in that.

House Speaker Paul Ryan has actually started using a phrase lately – ‘Raise our gaze.’ He’s exactly right, too. That’s what I’d like to see in a presidential candidate. I don’t like the bricks being thrown back and forth. That’s not inspiring to me and to most of our electorate, I think.

For me, the male gaze is oppressive. And I hope if we are building a female gaze that it’s inclusive, and it’s about pure desire and not how I want people to look in order for them to be desired by me.

I identify myself with the male gaze, I grew up with the male gaze, I’ve been excited by the male gaze. I’m a product of that culture.

Being an actor, I’ve thought about being in the male gaze.

If there’s a woman who is exhibiting her femininity or performing her femininity, it’s always seen as meant to pull in the male gaze.

Need a body-confidence boost? Pick up a pair of dumbbells and let your gaze linger on the outline of your biceps as you lift the weights.

Russia! Russia… Everything in you is open, desolate and level; your squat towns barely protrude in the midst of the plains like dots, like counters; there is nothing to tempt or enchant the onlooker’s gaze. But what is this inscrutable, mysterious force that draws me to you?

There must be something wrong with the mirrors in our house because every single one I gaze into makes me appear somewhat overweight.

Behold a worthy sight, to which the God, turning his attention to his own work, may direct his gaze. Behold an equal thing, worthy of a God, a brave man matched in conflict with evil fortune.

Mothers subject their daughters to a level of scrutiny people usually reserve for themselves. A mother‘s gaze is like a magnifying glass held between the sun‘s rays and kindling. It concentrates the rays of imperfection on her daughter’s yearning for approval. The result can be a conflagration – whoosh.

Through his mastery of storytelling techniques, he has managed to separate his character, in the public mind, from his actions as president. He has, in short, mesmerized us with that steady gaze.

A bunch of liberals wanted to outlaw men gazing at women because the gaze was said to objectify women. Sorry, liberals, it can’t be helped among the heterosexual crowd.

I seek to cast an incorruptible gaze on women, especially where they are the accomplices of men.

Before I had my son, I became obsessed by this painting I’d seen in an art gallery. It was a lot of money, but I felt such a rush of adrenaline when I wrote the cheque to buy it. I thought I was going to gaze lovingly at it forever, but after just two weeks, I realised I didn’t really like it any more.

I knew that there was a great deal of depth and life that was sitting just beyond my mother’s gaze.

Gauguin is creepy – let’s just face it. He goes off into the Pacific, and he’s looking at these young girls, and the colonial gaze: It’s just really problematic.

For me, the thought of spaghetti and meatballs conjures up the image of that scene where ‘Lady and the Tramp‘ gaze into each other’s eyes as they slurp a strand of pasta into a fateful kiss.

There’s this long history of colonialism and the colonial gaze when applied to matters related to China. So a lot of conceptions about China in literary representations in the West are things you can’t even fight against because they’ve been there so long that they’ve become part of the Western imagination of China.

Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. I often make a point of seeking them out and have used them as mouthpieces in my film poetry, as with Heinrich Heine in ‘The Gaze of the Gorgon.’

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn’t a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg? I don’t know. I think it’s a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility.

I don’t even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I’ve never used a computer.

‘Jism’ is what it is because of my feminine gaze… And I believe strongly that my female audiences deserve eye candy as much as my male audiences do!

Now that we are used to globalisation it’s hard to imagine a time when the countries behind the iron curtain were largely obscured from the western gaze. The Soviet bloc was a genuine mystery. Such was the dehumanisation of the Soviets that Sting could wonder in song if ‘the Russians love their children too.’

We young Filipinos are trying to make over a nation and must not halt in our march, but from time to time turn our gaze upon our elders. We shall wish to read in their countenances approval of our actions.

I have watched patients stand and gaze longingly toward the city they in all likelihood will never enter again. It means liberty and life; it seems so near, and yet heaven is not further from hell.

It seems kosher and OK to treat women as objects because the business of cinema is about images and when you have fragmented images of a woman’s bosom and her swiveling hip and her twisting navel, it robs the woman of all autonomy and subjects her to the male gaze.

Not so long ago, my feminist education taught me to ask the question, ‘Is the gaze male?’ The answer, apparently, is yes, which is why so many movies and television shows are about men and not women.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

I hate people who ‘gaze rape’ me.

I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly – or ever – gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe.

There is always shame in the creation of an object for the public gaze.

I can never tire of speaking of the bridges of Paris. By day and by night have I paused on them to gaze at their views; the word not being too comprehensive for the crowds and groupings of objects that are visible from their arches.

Portraits of other great ones look down on you in your college halls; but while you are young and sit at the brief feast, what avails their serene gaze if it do not lift up your hearts and movingly persuade you to match your manhood to its inheritance?

It is time that the female gaze made its presence felt both in cinema and in a world that’s been driven by intolerance, greed, hate and lust. We need to make gentler, more inclusive films where multiple voices may be heard.

If we broaden our gaze, it will be more interesting, more beautiful.

In a lot of the Regency stuff we’ve seen in the past, we see a very composed woman. There’s not much sexuality there. It’s very much the male gaze.

Whenever I gaze up at the moon, I feel like I’m on a time machine. I am back to that precious pinpoint of time, standing on the foreboding – yet beautiful – Sea of Tranquility. I could see our shining blue planet Earth poised in the darkness of space.

You have woman filmmakers, who have a male gaze. They play according to the rules of the patriarchal system and make a success of it.

This is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff. I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance.

A selfie is a sort of interesting way to reclaim the gaze, right? You’re looking at yourself and taking a photo while looking at everyone. But also, who cares?

I told Mother of my decision to study medicine. She encouraged me to speak to Father… I began in a roundabout way… He listened, looking at me with that serious and penetrating gaze of his that caused me such trepidation, and asked whether I knew what I wanted to do.

Too little is it considered, while we gaze on aristocratic beauty, how much good food, soft lying, warm wrapping, ease of mind, have to do with the attractions which command our admiration.

I’ve not done badly for a boy from Stockwell, where I used to gaze at the silver screen in wonderment, little realising I’d be a part of this magical world.

The police pull up in back of my car and run my plates – they don’t see you as you are; they see you through a racialized negative gaze. I think the best thing is not to internalize it too much, or it’ll make you crazy because you know it’s going to happen again.

I treat the camera like a person – I gaze into it. Photos are a flat thing, and you need to put life into them.

When I was a young boy, I used to gaze through the microscope of my father at the insects in amber that he kept in the house. And they were remarkably well preserved, morphologically just phenomenal.