Bill Viola Quotes

The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is second.

In opening them, he discovered that he had eyes.

Sight is the noblest sense of man.

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.

Eyesight should learn from reason.

People seen by the mind are exactly different to things seen by the eye. They grow smaller and smaller as you come nearer down to them, whereas things become bigger.

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray.

For sight is woman-like and shuns the old.

I'm such a jerk; it had never occurred to me that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens; it's these things that are taken for granted and it never occurs to anyone to think about them.

You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to perceive it.

Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

With vision we flourish.

The picture is in your head, in your imagination, everything.

The source of all light is in the eye.

You have to continue and discover the grammar of things, of what we can see.

Seeing well transforms mere existence into the art of living.

There is such a thing as the impression of luminosity.

It might be good to open our eyes and see.

Seeing is a neglected enterprise.

Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.

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

Imagination is the beginning of reality.