Vik Muniz Quotes

Einstein says common sense is just habit of thought. It's how we're used to thinking about things, but a lot of the time it just gets in the way.

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

Art is supposed to hold up a mirror to its audience and ask, 'What do you believe? What do you think? What do you feel?' and if you look at a painting and it makes you feel nothing, that's a feeling as well.

As for the notion that everything has already been said, maybe it has, but life is like meatloaf: there are so many different ways to present it.

People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.

It's like a magic well. You think you know everything about [a] photograph, you think you've gotten everything out of it, and all of a sudden I see things in it I'd never seen before.

Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.

It is wonderful to work in an environment with a lot of smart people. It challenges you to think and work on a different level. If you play with better players, you learn a lot: perspectives, intellectual arguments, new ways of thinking about things.

Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces. It is concerned with the perception part of thinking. This is where we organise the external world into the pieces we can then 'process'.

I'm not comfortable with categories, and I distrust most definitions. The word 'definition' is based on the word 'finite,' which would seem to indicate that once we've defined something, we don't need to think about it anymore.

It is possible that scientists, poets, painters and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call common-place and to 're-present' them to us - the world - in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded.

To think is not always to see.

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't.

Complacency with our traditional judgement based thinking methods is not enough. Our existing thinking habits are excellent just as the rear wheel of a motor car is excellent but not enough. We need to put far more emphasis on creative and design thinking. Judgement and analysis are not enough.

Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit." "Perhaps it hasn't one," Alice ventured to remark. "Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

It is a truism to say that a good experiment is precisely that which spares us the exertion of thinking: the better it is, the less we have to worry about its interpretation, about what it really means.

If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.

If you think what you see on TV is prejudiced, it is. Follow your instincts.

As soon as anybody does one of my songs, I rejoice. This particular case of all these great singers doing my work - the implications are very rich and the temptation to think of the outcome of these masses of the mainstream injecting my work into the marketplace, it's a very sweet speculation.

As you think, so you become.....Our busy minds are forever jumping to conclusions, manufacturing and interpreting signs that aren't there.

Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty.

The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint... I'd like to pretend that I've never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything... and then make something... Every time I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something, I think about the person who made it... Nothing is important... so everything is important.

Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.