Thomas George Bonney Quotes

To observations which ourselves we make, we grow more partial for th' observer's sake.

It's like I understand images and some people understand poetry.

I've always been so surprised by how people interpret my photos in context.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

In all our perceptions, from vision to hearing, to the pictures we build of people's character, our unconscious mind starts from whatever objective data is available to us - usually spotty - and helps to shape and construct the more complete picture we consciously perceive.

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

What a man sees depends on what he looks at and what his previous experience has taught him to see.

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.

The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.

You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.

Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions

Thirdly-but not lastly-there was the bias toward what people saw with their own eyes, or thought they had seen. The human mind played tricks on itself when it relied exclusively on what it saw. There was a lot you couldn't see when you watched a game

When I was studying at Chicago and at Stanford University, where many many cases of two people observing the same event have a different take on what happened.

The errors of the observer come from the qualities of the human mind.

When we perceive any object of a familiar kind, much of what appears subjectively to be immediately given is really derived from past experience.

Theory can blind observation.

... negative feelings are not true feelings at all; rather, they are your thoughts about something, based always on the previous experience of yourself and others. You will not find Truth in your past data, only past data that is based on other past data that is based on other past data, and so forth. Forget your "past experience" and look directly at the experience you are having. Right Here, Right Now. There is your Truth.

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.

It is probably well on the conservative side to estimate that during the past ten to fifteen years the camera has destroyed a thousand pairs of eyes, corrupted ten thousand, and seriously deceived a hundred thousand, for every one pair that it has opened, and taught.

We are all prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything.

The microscopes that magnified the tears, studied warts and all. Still life flows on.

The scientific observer of the realm of nature is in a sense naturally and inevitably disinterested. At least, nothing in the natural scene can arouse his bias. Furthermore, he stands completely outside of the natural so that his mind, whatever his limitations, approximates pure mind. The observer of the realm of history cannot be disinterested in the same way, for two reasons: first, he must look at history from some locus in history; secondly, he is to a certain degree engaged in its ideological conflicts.

The popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling.

Your perception of the world is ... really a fabrication of your model of the world. You don't really see light or sound. You perceive it because your model says this is how the world is, and those patterns invoke the model. It's hard to believe, but it really is true.

If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other geometrical terms.