James Agee Quotes

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

I am a man for whom the outside world exists.

Nothing has existence unless you, I, or some living creature perceives it, and how it is perceived further influences that reality. Even time itself is not exempted from biocentrism.

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

Light knows when you're looking at it.

I thought of a high school report I did on the Belgian artist Rene Magritte and a quote I once read from him, something about his favorite walk being the one he took around his own bedroom. He said that he never understood the need for people to travel because all the poetry and perspective you're ever going to get you already posses. Anais Nin had the same idea. We see the world as we are. So if it's the same brain we bring with us every time we open our eyes, what's the difference if we're looking at an island cove or a pocket watch?

When millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there was no one there to hear it, does it - philosopically speaking - make a noise

Thought is the measure of life.

The world is chiefly a mental fact. From mind it receives the forms of time and space, the principle of casuality[sic], color, warmth, and beauty. Were there no mind, there would be no world.

'Tell me one last thing,' said Harry. 'Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?' Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure. 'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?'

Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.

Consciousness ... is the phenomenon whereby the universe's very existence is made known.

You can't have a universe without the mind entering into it.

Life is whatever we conceive it to be.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?

The part of my brain that was responsible for creating the world I lived and moved in and for taking the raw data that came in through my senses and fashioning it into a meaningful universe: that part of my brain was down, and out. And yet despite all of this, I had been alive, and aware, truly aware, in a universe characterized above all by love, consciousness, and reality. There was, for me, simply no arguing this fact. I knew it so completely that I ached.

Consciousness in the individual is that area where the totality of life is located.

Time and space are just projections of your consciousness.

I believe that reality is vastly richer than the cursory attention we usually give it permits us to understand. I like to write through a consciousness that allows me to suggest something of this richness.

I give life to that which I notice. What I don't notice dies.

Would there be trees if we didn't see them?

The 'path' comes into existence only when we observe it.

The world in which we live is the only world about which our senses can testify.

Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it's a miracle that we don't dissolve in our baths.