“As a creation of light, the eye does everything that light itself can do. Light gives to the eye what is visible, and the eye gives it to the whole man. The ear is silent, the mouth is deaf, but the eye perceives and speaks. In the eye the world is mirrored from without, the man from within. The totality of what lies within and without is completed by the eye.”

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from an early draft of his Farbenlehre, or Theory of Color, 1808. Quoted in a footnote by editor Douglas Miller, 1988.