Bill Viola Quotes

To make sense to us as physical creatures, any 'truth' must undergo transformations, be couched in certain terms or we couldn't understand it.

Everything I've seen becomes real once it becomes memory. The films I've seen are interchangeable with things that have really happened to me.

Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

All things are symbols: the external shows Of Nature have their image in the mind , As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves.

That was the thing about pictures--they were worth a thousand words, but sometimes they weren't the right ones.

I think that you really get what you recognize is in the universe.

The description is not the described.

Tender words we spoke to one another are sealed in the secret vaults of heaven. One day like rain, they will fall to earth and grow green all over the world.

Letters are things, not pictures of things.

We can easily represent things as we wish them to be.

Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.

Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear.

The more we see the more we must be able to imagine, and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.

Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.

Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.

The map appears to us more real than the land.

Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there's not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory.

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.

Whoever came up first with that saying a picture is worth a thousand words didn't understand the first thing about either one.

We stand or fall by television.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world colour and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I call "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind.

If you are wired to your memory, repetitions will happen and redundancy will come; but if you are paying attention, that changes your ability to look at things.

Memory is a form of time travel. That's something we do during the course of the day, every single day. The idea of actually being able to physically adjust that and change it instead of being haunted by it is a really human thing.