Giambattista Vico Quotes

God has given each one of us a gift greater than a thousand I.B.M. machines. It is called a memory, and everything that passes through our five senses is stored in this faculty.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

Illusions... are simple facts, but they have been created by the mind, by the spirit, and they are one of the justifications of the new spatial configuration.

What seems real to the mind can be as important as any material fact. We live by the spirit and the imagination as well as by our senses. Cartoon animation can give fantasy the same reality as those things we can touch and see and hear.

Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.

The problem with people who are afraid of imagination, of fantasy, is that their world becomes so narrow that I don't see how they can imagine beyond what their senses can verify. We know from science that there are entire worlds that our senses can't verify.

Art is about the messy and marvelous business of coming to your senses - and also, to the senses of the world.

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.

Everything is creative. It's all relative to me. No matter what, you've gotta use your imagination, use your senses.

Imagination is the eye of the soul.

We live in worlds that we have forged and composed. It's much more true than any of the species that you see. I mean, it seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine, to project out of our own immediate circumstances and to bring to mind things that aren't present here and now.

There are two worlds we live in: a material world, bound by the laws of physics, and the world inside our mind, which is just as important.

I don't know why you'd want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I'm always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We're both saying something we want to be true.

If you will give the matter a moment's thought, you'll see that memory is the highest faculty of the human mind.

Through writing, one experiences something different to what one experiences with the five senses one has because language is a different metier.

The best recording is the one you bring with you in your mind.

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

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.

There is a power in the human mind ... to see things as they are ... but there is equally a power to see things as they might be.

Mind conjures miracles out of time.

The things best to know are first principles and causes, but these things are perhaps the most difficult for men to grasp, for they are farthest removed from the senses.

A great deal of phenomenal experience has fostered in me a flexibility of the mind and imagination that some might call madness