David Hockney Quotes

I don't think I could tell the whole truth about anything. That's a pretty heavy burden, because we all just view the world through this little piece of coke bottle.

No, I don't think you're ever an objective observer. By making a frame you're being selective, then you edit the pictures you want published and you're being selective again. You develop a point of view that you want to express. You try to go into a situation with an open mind, but then you form an opinion, and you express it in your photographs.

A generation which has passed through the shop has absorbed standards and ambitions which are not of those of spaciousness, and cannot get away from them. Everything with them is done as though for sale, and they naturally have in view the greatest possible benefit, profit and that end of the stuff that will make the best show.

most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.

Ezra Pound still lives in a village and his world is a kind of village and people keep explaining things when they live in a village.... I have come not to mind if certain people live in villages and some of my friends still appear to live in villages and a village can be cozy as well as intuitive but must one really keep perpetually explaining and elucidating?

We somehow believe that our point of view is superior, higher than those of the greatest minds either because our point of view is that of our time, and our time, being later than the time of the greatest minds, can be presumed to be superior to their times; or else because we believe that each the greatest minds was right from his point of view, but not, as he claims, simply right.

Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men.

[I]f a man bred to the seafaring life, and accustomed to think and talk only of matters relating to navigation, enters into discourse upon any other subject; it is well known, that the language and the notions proper to his own profession are infused into every subject, and all things are measured by the rules of navigation: and if he should take it into his head to philosophize concerning the faculties of the mind, it cannot be doubted, but he would draw his notions from the fabric of the ship, and would find in the mind, sails, masts, rudder, and compass.

I don't think you can develop or learn a way of seeing or a point of view. A way of seeing is who you are, how you think and how you create images. It is something that is inside of you. It's how you look at the world.

Smallness of mind is the cause of stubbornness, and we do not credit readily what is beyond our view.

You mortals are like fish swimming in a globe of glass. That globe is your world. You do not see beyond it.

A narrow mind begets obstinacy; we do not easily believe what we cannot see.

I'm a dumb guy. My point of view is limited.

One of the disadwantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency too see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimensions. This, somehow, seemed to render all matters of intellect shallow and worthless.

You have a bigger view, of something bigger than you, and you have to view that and take that in mind. At times you feel like despair rises up over hope, then other times you feel hopeful again.

It's best to incorporate a broadly eclectic point of view, and let whatever moves you be your inspiration.

I even move out onto the front porch and see my own limited view of the world. I want to take that world, and for the first time ever, I feel like I can do it. I’ve survived everything I’ve had to so far. I’m still standing here.

We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.

A mind that doesn't question its judgements, makes the world very small and dangerous.

Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?" "Then what died? who are you mourning?" "A point of view.

The world is a living being - one nature, one soul. Keep that in mind.

The World is a very complex system. It is easy to have too simple a view of it, and it is easy to do harm and to make things worse under the impulse to do good and make things better.

We can't escape from the world anymore; we can't escape from the mind. We need to enter surrender while we are in the world. That seems to be the path that is effective in the world that we live in now.

Falsehood, like a drawing in perspective, will not bear to be examined in every point of view, because it is a good imitation of truth, as a perspective is of the reality, only in one. But truth, like that reality of which the perspective is the representation, will bear to be scrutinized in all points of view, and though examined under every situation, is one and the same.

Institutions have the pathetic megalomania of the computer whose whole vision of the world is its own program.