Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

Everything you see is filtered through your visual system (imperfect) and your brain (also imperfect, despite what your mom told you). Witness testimony is the worst kind of evidence in science.

There are optical illusions in time as well as space.

Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.

The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.

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

One can take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front. So it would read as a black letter or a line, but it would also read as neon because there would be light coming from behind that black letter.

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

The eye always fills in the imperfections.

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

You know how it is when you’re walking up the stairs, and you get to the top, and you think there’s one more step? I’m like that all the time.

It's very difficult when you have learned something a certain way. Not only your mind absorbs it; your eyes also are trained to see in a certain way because eyes are only as good as you've been trained to see.

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

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.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to perceive it.

If you stand too close to a painting - all you see are patches of color, if you stand too far back, you can't see any of the detail.

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.

One of the most pervasive mistakes is to believe that our visual system gives a faithful representation of what is "out there" in the same way that a movie camera would.

What we already know frames what we see, and what we see frames what we understand.

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

And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.

When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it's lost space when there's something in it.

The beholder's eye, which moves like an animal grazing, follows paths prepared for it in the picture.

Oftentimes what you see cancels out what you perceive.

The Last Supper is supposed to be thirteen men. Who is this woman? "Everyone misses it, our preconceived notions of this scene are so powerful that our mind blocks out the incongruity and overrides our eyes.