Plato Quotes

A mountain seen in the haze of distance must nevertheless look a solid heavy mountain.

A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.

There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

It's pretty far, but it doesn't seem like it.

The mountain at a given distance In amber lies; Approached, the amber flits a little,-- And that's the skies!

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.

It is quite possible we may have formed entirely erroneous ideas of what we actually see. The greenish gray patches may not be seas at all, nor the ruddy continents, solid land. Neither may the obscuring patches be clouds of vapor.

From a distance it is something; and nearby it is nothing.

Beauty, my dear Sir, is not so much a quality of the object beheld, as an effect in him who beholds it. If our sight were longer or shorter, or if our constitution were different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen, and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through the microscope will appear horrible. Some things are beautiful at a distance, but ugly near;

"I see nobody on the road," said Alice. "I only wish I had such eyes," the King remarked in a fretful tone. "To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light."

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

What looks large from a distance, close up ain’t never that big.

There are three aspects to perspective. The first has to do with how the size of objects seems to diminish according to distance: the second, the manner in which colors change the farther away they are from the eye; the third defines how objects ought to be finished less carefully the farther away they are.

The sun never sets. It is only an appearance due to the observer's limited perspective. And yet, what a sublime illusion it is.

If you stand too close to a painting - all you see are patches of color, if you stand too far back, you can't see any of the detail.

The horizon is more than a convention of landscape painting, less than truth.

Oftentimes what you see cancels out what you perceive.

Paintings and fightings are best seen at a distance.

The assumption that seeing is believing makes us susceptible to visual deception.

What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real.

Illusion - or rather appearance, semblance - is the theme of my life (could be theme of speech welcoming freshmen to the Academy). All that is, seems, and is visible to us because we perceive it by the reflected light of semblance. Nothing else is visible.

Why does the past look so enticing to us? For the same reason why from a distance a meadow with flowers looks like a flower bed.