Henry James Quotes

Light knows when you're looking at it.

I became startled by the extraordinary difference between something whose surface is completely invisible which only makes itself present by virtue of what it reflects, and a window, which doesn't make itself apparent at all, in the ideal case.

It's so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence.

One of the kinds of things I'm consistently interested in is what the border between the seen and not seen is and the border between being able to perceive something and not perceive it.

Out of sight is out of mind.

Look. This is your world! You can't not look. There is no other world. This is your world; it is your feast. You inherited this; you inherited these eyeballs; you inherited this world of color. Look at the greatness of the whole thing. Look! Don't hesitate - look! Open your eyes. Don't blink, and look, look - look further.

The light was only just visible - except of course that there was no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a light.

But if they don't exist, how can a man see them?

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

We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible.

who is invisible enough to see you

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

In the darkness, he is invisible, but I can still feel him beside me. Sometimes you don't have to see something to know it is there.

The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact.

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

I'm trying to do what I have never done - give the impression one has on entering a room: one sees everything and at the same time nothing.

When people say, 'I don't see you enough,' well just because you don't see me don't mean I don't exist, or just 'cause you haven't heard me don't mean I haven't been making noise. But if I keep making noise, you'll pick up.

You can't hit what you can't see.

Time is only an idea. There is only the Reality. Whatever you think it is, it looks like that. If you call it time, it is time. If you call it existence, it is existence, and so on. After calling it time, you divide it into days and nights, months, years, hours, minutes, etc. Time is immaterial for the Path of Knowledge.

I want to see, that's all. This is my life. I want to see.

The perception of the audience is the interesting part. If the audience doesn't hear what is going on, is it going on or not?

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Life is but thought.

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.