Teller Quotes

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

You think you're looking at things all the time, but you're not looking at things, you're looking at what your brain is interpreting through light and color. And who knows what everybody else sees?

What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes.

I was fascinated with optical illusions.

While just looking, we are always hunting among objects, looking for what we desire or fear, endeavoring to recognize some pattern; on the other hand, objects themselves always "stare back," vie for our attention, throw at us their lures and endeavor to entrap us.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.

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

One of the things that Teller and I are obsessed with, one of the reasons that we're in magic, is the difference between fantasy and reality. That is the subject that, if you have a brain in your head, is always dealt with in magic. The smarter the tricks you're doing, the more that' s an important thing.

99 percent of what you see is not what comes in through the eyes. It is what you infer about that room.

When I see a colour or hear a sound, I am aware of something, and not of nothing.

The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.

There are optical illusions in time as well as space.

What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.

What is experience? A poor little hut constructed from the ruins of the palace of gold and marble called our illusions.

I discover vision, not as a 'thinking about seeing,' to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.

The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.

We believe what we see.’...What do you do when you’re in the dark?

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

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

The eye and brain are conspirators, and, like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness.

Seeing-is-believing is a blind spot in man's vision.

The idea part is simple but the visual perception is complex.

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.