Socrates Quotes

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

Color deceives continuously.

I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

Seeing-is-believing is a blind spot in man's vision.

The assumption that seeing is believing makes us susceptible to visual deception.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

You can't trust water: Even a straight stick turns crooked in it.

One of the things that Teller and I are obsessed with, one of the reasons that we're in magic, is the difference between fantasy and reality. That is the subject that, if you have a brain in your head, is always dealt with in magic. The smarter the tricks you're doing, the more that' s an important thing.

I no longer worry whether a painting is about something or not. I am only concerned with the expectation, from a flat surface, of an illusion.

The problem with stage magic is that it looks really good, but everyone knows there's a trick box.

Magic's an art where you use slight of hand or illusion to create wonder. And I was just intrigued with that idea.

Double Spectacles

I miss the newness of Magic Eye posters, which really are amazing.

I had a much better view with the halo than I expected.

And the nature of magic is all in the person's experience. Whether the magician is using a highly complex sleight of hand or he's just got two cards that are the same, it doesn't matter: it's how it's sold and how magical it is for the person that matters.

Great affectation and great absence of it are at first sight very similar.

Were all the letters sun, I could not see one.

The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place.

Do not the Rays of Light which fall upon Bodies, and are reflected or refracted, begin to bend before they arrive at the Bodies; and are they not reflected, refracted, and inflected, by one and the same Principle, acting variously in various Circumstances?

Meanwhile let us cast one shadow in air and water.

One can take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front. So it would read as a black letter or a line, but it would also read as neon because there would be light coming from behind that black letter.

It is the eye which makes the horizon.

Color, to continue had to occur in space.