Rene Magritte Quotes

It is possible to interpret without observing, but not to observe without interpreting.

A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

You can't tell what a man is like or what he is thinking when you are looking at him. You must get around behind him and see what he has been looking at.

Nature is what you see plus what you think about it.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.

Everything I think in life is about context and intention.

Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.

Does it mean this, does it mean that, that's all anybody wants to know. I'd say what any decent poet would say if anyone dared ask him to analyze his work: if you see it, darling, then it's there!

You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit." "Perhaps it hasn't one," Alice ventured to remark. "Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

I think perception is important.

The analysis of concepts is for the understanding nothing more than what the magnifying glass is for sight.

I'm here to make sense.

When you're being looked at very hard, it's very hard to look back. And that made me stop paying attention to the world in a way that allowed me then to write about it.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either.

A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents.

It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.

I'm constantly thinking.

See into life, don't just look at it.

A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.

To understand is to perceive patterns.