Gerhard Richter Quotes

We live on the leash of our senses.

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

The senses do not deceive us, but the judgment does.

How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?

The entire world we apprehend through our senses is no more than a tiny fragment in the vastness of Nature.

History is nothing more than the belief in the senses, the belief in falsehood.

Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call “reality”. However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions?

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends on your mistaking it for reality.

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

When we consider reality itself we quickly become aware of its infinite complexity, and we realize that our habitual perception of it is often inadequate. If this were not so, the concept of deception would be meaningless.

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I'd have been lying!

There are conditions worse than being unable to see, and that is imagining one sees.

You can't see the world through a mirror.

We are what we seem to be.

Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.

Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. "Things as they are" are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become "things as perceived by your wishes.

The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.

How much of what we call 'reality' is actually out there or rather within our own head?

In all aspects of life... we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

You take the senses away, and there is no consciousness. Consciousness comes from experience.

Don't ignore the five senses in search of a sixth.

We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.