Quotes About Reality

Kitsch is much more than a question of style; it's a preference for consolation over truth. Disney's version of reality is not just cleaned up, it's pernicious. Unlike the best forms of art and philosophy, it undercuts the possibility of transformation because it portrays a world that's just fine as it is--or as it will be by the time the credits come up.

I am unable to lead a life based on an illusion.

It may be true that you can't judge a book by its cover, Daisy G. had told Blister just last summer. But the cover tells you something about the book and don't ever pretend it doesn't.

In any situation, the person who can most accurately describe reality without laying blame will emerge as the leader, whether designated or not. Here's

Your version of reality is as good as anybody's.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

Alone, alone. I am alone – I ache … Yet for the first time, despite all the anguish and the reality problems, I'm here. I feel tranquil, whole, ADULT.

Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.

Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a 'lamp'; not a woman, but a 'woman'.

In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.

In fact, words do speak louder than pictures. Captions do tend to override the evidence of our eyes; but no caption can permanently restrict or secure a picture's meaning.

Image of an image of an image... But to record all the dips and upswings, in a sense falsifies them, and I start deluding myself and thinking all this is, or might be, real. Enough to play the game, or try to play it. A mistake to tally up the score.

La sabiduría esencial de la imagen fotográfica afirma: «Ésa es la superficie. Ahora piensen —o más bien sientan, intuyan— qué hay más allá, cómo debe de ser la realidad si ésta es su apariencia».

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.

La necesidad de confirmar la realidad y dilatar la experiencia mediante fotografías es un consumismo estético al que hoy todos son adictos. Las sociedades industriales transforman a sus ciudadanos en yonquis a las imágenes; es la forma más irresistible de contaminación mental.

Everyone else not real-very distant, small figures. I would have to swim a thousand miles to reach the margin of the relationship, on the other side of which might lie other people, and it was too far, I was too tired. The almost infinitely extending network of that relationship; its dense weave That's what held me-

With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such—of what lies beyond the human and the made—and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.

Una fotografía es a la vez una pseudopresencia y un signo de ausencia.

If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

Often something looks, or is felt to look, better in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.