Mitch Hedberg Quotes

A friend said to me, "I think the weather is trippy." I said, "No, man, it's not the weather that's trippy, perhaps it's the way we perceive it." And then I realized I just should have said, "Yeah."

I love learning how people hear my music because everyone has different references.

Music sounds different to the one who plays it. It is the musician's curse.

Feel the world, instead of trying to understand the world.

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

It's just a sound, and a feeling that's in the music. And you either hear it and appreciate it, or you don't.

Only to the rude ear of one who is quite indifferent does the song of a bird seem always the same.

The senses don't just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern.

What is beauty? Beauty is no more than a trick; a delusion; the influence of excited particles and electrons colliding in your eyes, jostling in your brain like a bunch of overeager school children, about to be released on break. Will you let yourself be deluded? Will you let yourself be decieved? -"On Beauty and Falsehood," The New Philosophy, by Ellen Dorpshire

My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers.

Our five senses are faulty data-taking devices, and they need help.

You heard me. You ain't blind.

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge - and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge.

Philosophers say that nothing can be seen that is neither illuminated nor colored.

I open my eyes and my ears, and that’s why I work.

I have no use for knowledge that has not been preceded by a sensation

Things which we see are not by themselves what we see ... It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.

The sensory world is the school, without which the human being would never come to the spirit.

To excite in us tastes, odors, and sounds I believe that nothing is required in external bodies except shapes, numbers, and slow or rapid movements. ... if ears, tongues, and noses were removed, shapes and numbers and motions would remain, but not odors or tastes or sounds.

When I listen to the engine of my car, I might say it sounds fine, but it would not occur to me to say "What lovely music!

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

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there

You can't be conscious unless you have variable receptors... When people say the way I see the world is the way it is - that's ridiculous. We can only see it depending on the quality of our receptors and background.

Every man feels that perception gives him an invincible belief of the existence of that which he perceives; and that this belief is not the effect of reasoning, but the immediate consequence of perception. When philosophers have wearied themselves and their readers with their speculations upon this subject, they can neither strengthen this belief, nor weaken it; nor can they shew how it is produced. It puts the philosopher and the peasant upon a level; and neither of them can give any other reason for believing his senses, than that he finds it impossible for him to do otherwise.