Giorgio Morandi Quotes

The physical universe that you see is all in your mind. When you turn your mind off, or become unconscious, the physical universe, for you, disappears. Then, when you awaken your consciousness, the universe reappears magically. Quite simple really - no thoughts on your part, no physical world. As Walt Whitman succinctly stated: "The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual - namely to You." Without your mind to process it, the universe simply disappears into nothingness.

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.

What you believe you experience.

Reality is perspective. All you have to do is Believe.

The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.

And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

The world you see is less of an indication about the world and more of an indication about your seeing.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.

I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process.

All things show up in the world according to the purposes we ascribe to them.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?

To be is to be perceived

But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park [. . .] and nobody by to perceive them. [...] The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden [. . .] no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them.

Reality' is a word with many meanings.

Perhaps looking out through big baby eyes - if we could - would not be as revelatory experience as many imagine. We might see a world inhabited by objects and people, a world infused with causation, agency, and morality - a world that would surprise us not by its freshness but by its familiarity.

There are many levels of truth.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Man lives in a world of meaning.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

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.

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?