Novalis Quotes

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.

Light comes to us by the sensibility. Without visual sensibility there is no light, no movement.

The mind is the seat of perception of the things we see, hear, and feel. It is through the mind that we see the beauties of the earth and sky, or music, of art, in fact, of everything. That silent shuttle of thought working in and out through cell and nerve weaves into one harmonious whole the myriad moods of mind, and we call it life.

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there

Every morning we awaken from sleep and from our dreams and enter the state we call wakefulness. A continuous stream of thoughts, most of them repetitive, characterizes the normal wakeful state.

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.

Folded eyes see brighter colors than the open ever do.

It is clear that every immediate object of our senses both exists and is real in the primary meaning of these terms so long as we remain aware of the object.

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.

In the perception of a tree we can distinguish the act of experiencing, or perceiving, from the thing experienced, or perceived.

When I see a colour or hear a sound, I am aware of something, and not of nothing.

We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

As instruments for knowing the objects, the sense organs are outside, and so they are called outer senses; and the mind is called the inner sense because it is inside. But the distinction between inner and outer is only with reference to the body; in truth, there is neither inner nor outer. The mind's nature is to remain pure like ether.

I like to use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception. I want you to sense yourself sensing - to see yourself seeing.

I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.

We are astonished at thought, but sensation is equally wonderful.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

Awareness means the capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the birds sing in one's own way and not the way one was taught.

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.