Quotes About Perception

We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.

She loved herself, and her body's resistance to all those poisons was the exact measure of how indestructibly young and beautiful she felt she was.

His eyes had seen it all. He was 24 years old.

I knewThat life was fiction in disguise.

This life is a shadowy thing, lad. We live in a crowded space of lights and shadows, and when left to ourselves, we all too often fail to see the brightest light of all.

I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?

No sensible person would prefer a computer screen to a well printed page for reading text

the great thing about literature is that you can imagine; the great thing about film is that you can't.

Mary was still thinking in terms of a dead body when Jesus confronted her with His living presence.

Watch for contradictory information (page 37).

The odor of bowel wind is known to every human, but the fragrance of book glue has crossed only a fraction of mortal nostrils. And yet it behooves us not to judge the unlettered too harshly. We must stay the impulse to write CHUCKLEHEAD above their doors and carve DOLT upon their tombstones.

Fiction can be more real to the reader than reality itself because fiction is the essence of life

Words of wisdom are spoken by children at least as often as scientists.

Art is not art, therefore, except as it leads to an engendering creativity in its beholders.

What is at stake here for owners is not the amount of property as such, but its ability to draw an audience for whom it will be appropriately emblematic; that is, and audience who will see it as just compensation for the effort and skill used in acquiring it.

A horizon is a phenomenon of vision. One cannot look at the horizon; it is simply the point beyond which we cannot see. There is nothing in the horizon itself, however, that limits vision, for the horizon opens onto all that lies beyond itself. What limits vision is rather the incompleteness of that vision

It is not the role of metaphor to draw our sight to what is there, but to draw our vision toward what is not there and, indeed, cannot be anywhere. Metaphor is horizonal, reminding us that it is one's vision that is limited, and not what one is viewing.

At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about. This means that we can never have the falcon, only the word "falcon." To say that we have the falcon, and not the "falcon," is to presume again that we know precisely what it is we have, that we can see it in its entirety, and that we can speak as nature itself.

The physicists who look at their objects within their limitations teach physics; those who see the limitations they place around their objects teach "physics." For them physics is a poiesis.

We see nature as genius when we see as genius.

True conversions consist in the choice of a new audience, that is, of a new world. All that was once familiar is now seen in startlingly new ways.

When I forsake my genius and speak to you as though I were another, I also speak to you as someone you are not and somewhere you are not. I address you as audience, and do not expect you to respond as the genius you are.

We can be moved only by way of our veils. We are touched through our veils.

When machinery functions perfectly it ceases to be there-but so do we. Radios and films allow us to be where we are not and not be where we are. Moreover, machinery is veiling. It is a way of hiding our inaction from ourselves under what appear to be actions of great effectiveness. We persuade ourselves that, comfortably seated behind the wheels of our autos, shielded from every unpleasant change of weather, and raising or lowering our foot an inch or two, we have actually traveled somewhere.