Abraham Maslow Quotes

I'm very interested in the question of how we perceive something, how consciousness goes from one thing, like looking at you in your black hat to what it might mean to my imagination and how I would draw that or write that, how I would subjectify you? It's something that is endlessly interesting to me.

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

We always try to interpret things in accordance with what we want and not as they are.

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

When we describe what the other person is really like, I suppose we often picture what we want. We look through the prism of our need.

My poems mean what people take them to mean.

The fact is one thing and the idea about the fact is another.

Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.

Facts do not constitute truth.

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

The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.

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.

I think everyone does selective reading. Everybody has a filter, and that is real easy for critics to see things from their perspectives, and I'm going, I didn't mean that at all. And believers do the same.

We do not hear what we hear..., only what we remember.

Let me say no more. Words do no justice to the hidden meaning. Everything immediately becomes slightly different when it is expressed in words, a little bit distorted, a little foolish...It is perfectly fine with me that what for one man is precious wisdom for another sounds like foolery.

If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but of thinking of the question that is raised.

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!

Abstraction means getting away from a visual interpretation but nearer to an emotional one.

Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

Until you decide what something means, it has no meaning at all. You determine what something means.

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.

You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.

but even the facts do not always tell the truth