Marshall McLuhan Quotes

For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism.

The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project

The texture of experience is prior to everything else.

Being is seeing in the human dimension.

Thought is just an apprehension of touch.

There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.

I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and consciousness is the ability to feel things and have subjective experiences.

The author isn't altogether certain that there is any such thing as exaggeration. Our brains permit us to use such a wee fraction of their resources that, in a sense, everything we experience is a reduction. We employ drugs, yoga techniques and poetics - and a thousand more clumsy methods - in an effort just to bring things back up to normal.

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

As human beings, the closest we can get to truth is through story.

We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.

An illusion which is a real experience is worth having.

There is nothing outside of us that is not at the same time in us, and as the external world has its colors the eye, too, has colors.

...they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.

[L]et my reader who is puzzled by my awkward explanations close his eyes for no more than two minutes, and see if he does not find himself suddenly not a compact human being at all, but only a consciousness on a sea of sound and touch . . .

The difficulty is to learn to perceive with your whole body, not with just your eyes and reason. The world becomes a stream of tremendously rapid, unique events. So you must trim your body to make it a good receptor. The body is an awareness; and it must be treated impeccably.

My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.

Reality is irrelevant; Perception is everything.

Il n'y a pas d'autre univers qu'un univers humain, l'univers de la subjectivite humaine. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity.

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

Problems exist only in the human mind.

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a ‘real’ experience.

Only in the 20th century, artists started taking the study of perception in a more humane way. They were thinking about the eye as being an instrument, the whole body as being a visual instrument. That sort of gave way a little bit with Cartesian­ - the "Cogito ergo sum" argument. It's not, "I think therefore I exist." It's, "I feel therefore I think therefore I exist."