John Ashbery Quotes

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

Everything is true and not true about everything. That’s one thing I’ve learned.

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.

… what is white to one person may be gray to another.

The knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

Truth is an illusory notion.

What, then is truth?... Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.

To know the world, one must construct it

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

What darkness to you is light to me

The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.

The way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from.

Change is always subjective.

I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.

There is no such thing as a true account of anything.

And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?

The notion that any one person can describe 'what really happened' is an absurdity. If ten - or a hundred - people witness an event, there will be ten - or a hundred - different versions of what took place. What we see and how we interpret it depends entirely upon our individual past experience.

In the world of knowledge, the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with effort.

You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.

Democritus says, "But we know nothing really; for truth lies deep down".

I don't think anyone's normal.

An object dies when the gaze that lights on it has disappeared.

Was not this ... what we spoke of as the great advantage of wisdom -- to know what is known and what is unknown to us?