Ralph Ellison Quotes

Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.

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

A thought is an idea in transit.

The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

When you're reading something, your imagination goes and you see it in your mind. Sometimes my instincts with that are right, and sometimes they're wrong.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

The more we see the more we must be able to imagine, and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world colour and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I call "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind.

The mind, in discovering truths, acts in the same manner as it acts through the eye in discovering objects; when once any object has been seen, it is impossible to put the mind back to the same condition it was in before it saw it.

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

To think is not always to see.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

You'd be surprised how hard it can often be to translate an action into an idea.

At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of experiencing, or, to speak more generally, processes of intuiting that grasp the object in the original.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

What you can imagine depends on what you know.

We never see a tree except through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. Look at a tree and you will find how extraordinarily difficult it is to see it completely, so that no image, no screen, comes between the seeing and the actual fact. By completely I mean with the totality of your mind and heart, not a fragment of it.

To see a thing clearly in the mind makes it begin to take form.

But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects... like some trick of magic each object is loosed into a group of impressions - colour, odour, texture... And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world... the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.

Imagination is a powerful force underlying all knowing

It taught that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.

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