Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.

You ride astride the imaginary in order to hunt down the real.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

The make-believe world of 'The Black Tower' succeeds by broadcasting larger truths that might otherwise elude us.

A mystic is a person who sees the facts as inadequate.

You learn that existence is legible but that you have to have a critical mind if you're going to read it.

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

Every fight is one between different angles of vision illuminating the same truth.

I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.

I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy.

It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.

The truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS.

Both the old and new physics were dealing with shadow-symbols, but the new physics was forced to be aware of that fact - forced to be aware that it was dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality.

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.

Nature is what you see plus what you think about it.

As a result, nature is something entirely different from what comes to mind when we invoke its name.

Reality is reality. It transcends every concept. There is no concept which can adequately describe it, not even the concept of interdependence.

I called the world of phenomena an illusion, I called my eyes and my tongue an accident, valueless phenomena. No, that is all over; I have awakened, I have really awakened and I have just been born today.

The images of things are not the things in themselves.