To See Things As They Really Are

Jonathan Mitchell, "A Letter...to His Friend" (1649), quoted in Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England, p. 91:

And truly when I am most near God,
I have no greater request than this
for my self and you, that God would use
any means to make us see things really as they are,
and pound our hearts all to pieces,
and make indeed sin most bitter,
and Christ most sweet, that we might be
both humbled and Comforted to purpose!

Robert Burns, To a Louse (1786):

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

[O would some Power the gift to give us
To see ourselves as others see us!]