Jacques Barzun Quotes

When I see a colour or hear a sound, I am aware of something, and not of nothing.

Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.

Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations.

How do we see physically? No differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning.

To think is an act. To feel is a fact.

Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.

There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness

The idea part is simple but the visual perception is complex.

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there

Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

...The body is affected by the image of the thing, in the same way as if the thing were actually present.

As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.

The more we see the more we must be able to imagine, and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.

Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.

Intuition was not just visual but also auditory and kinesthetic. Those who watched Feynman in moments of intense concentration came away with a strong, even disturbing sense of the physicality of the process, as though his brain did not stop with the grey matter but extended through every muscle in his body.

Strictly speaking, you don't think: Thinking happens to you.

You think you have a memory; but it has you!

It is a mistake, to think the same thing affects both sight and touch. If the same angle or square, which is the object of touch,be also the object of vision, what should hinder the blind man, at first sight, from knowing it?

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

Beauty is undefinable in language. It's something that you see when you see it, or you feel when you feel it, or you hear when you hear it. It usually encompasses all five of the senses. It can't exist without it being a somehow sensorial experience. But, I don't think it's quantifiable. Nothing is really quantifiable. Nothing is certain in love and friendship. We all try to understand these things.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world colour and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I call "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind.

Ideas are born from what is smelled, heard, seen, experienced, felt, emotionalized.