George Berkeley Quotes

The essential attribute of a new sense is, not the perception of external objects or influences which ordinarily do not act upon the senses, but that external causes should excite in it a new and peculiar kind of sensation different from all the sensations of our five senses.

I think sighted people let their eyes cheat them out of certain things. People who can see don't have a great sense of smell because they don't use it.

Your hand is cold, mine burns like fire. How blind you are, Nastenka!

In ordinary speech the words perception and sensation tend to be used interchangeably, but the psychologist distinguishes. Sensations are the items of consciousness--a color, a weight, a texture--that we tend to think of as simple and single. Perceptions are complex affairs that embrace sensation together with other, associated or revived contents of the mind, including emotions.

With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.

Le toucher est le plus de mystificateur de tous les sens, a' la diffe rence de la vue, qui est le plus magique. Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

What we hear strikes the mind with less force than what we see.

We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

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

My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.

Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. And we strain ourselves to see, see, see--everything, everything through the eye, inone mode of objective curiosity.

In a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing or listening experience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surrogate hand in filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make passes at girls who wear glasses.

The exercise of all the senses is as intense pleasure, as anyone will find, who recovers the use of one after being deprived of it.

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

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

Eric was holding my hands, and I was digging my nails into him like we were doing something else. He won't mind, I though, as I realized I'd drawn blood. And sure enough, he didn't. "Let go," he advised me, and I loosened my grip on his hands. "No, not of me," he said smiling. "You can hold on to me as long as you want.

Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.

As a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensuousness, I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant than a 'philosophical conception painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness.

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.

The great black and white draftsman, the sculptor, and the blind man know that form and color are separate. The form itself is what the blind man knows...Color is surface skin that fits over the form.

A letter doesn't communicate by words alone. A letter, just like a book, can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it. Thereby, intelligent folk will say, 'Go on then, read what the letter tells you!' whereas the dull-witted will say, 'Go on then, read what he's written!

It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it

The majority of human beings live their whole lives unaware that they are only seeing a limited cone of vision at any moment.