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"Turn away your eyes from me, for they overwhelm me" -- Song of Solomon 6:5

• omarchowdhury 8y ago
  I clicked expecting this comment. There's also the following from the Gospel of Thomas (verse 26): Jesus said, "You see the sliver in your friend's eye, but you don't see the timber in your own eye. When you take the timber out of your own eye, then you will see well enough to remove the sliver from your friend's eye."
  • rmdashrfstar 8y ago
    I don't understand what the meaning of this verse is, could you explain what is meant by timber and silver and the relation to the eyes?
    • schoen 8y ago
      You're misreading "sliver" as "silver" here. Some people have also translated these as "mote" and "beam". The idea is something like that people are judging others with harsh standards that they can't apply to themselves, so they will notice or point out a very tiny problem related to another person, but not notice or point out a big problem related to themselves. It's a metaphor about having objects of different sizes stuck in one's eye and then a different activation threshold, so to speak, for acting on it depending on whose eye it is. This is akin to several kinds of cognitive bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias Edit: original context in Matthew: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_and_the_Beam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_and_the_Beam The previous commenter mentioned that this saying appears in the Gospel of Thomas but it's much better known in this form from the Gospel of Matthew, which is considered canonical in Christianity.
    • NiekvdMaas 8y ago
      Sliver, not silver. I.e. you see/complain about the small mistakes of others but you fail to see the big ones of yourself.