Thomas Merton Quotes

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.

We say seeing is believing, but actually, we are much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe all the time and occasionally seeing what we can't believe

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

You think you're looking at things all the time, but you're not looking at things, you're looking at what your brain is interpreting through light and color. And who knows what everybody else sees?

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

Reality doesn't bite, rather our perception of reality bites.

We think we receive all that we perceive, but in fact, we actually give the sky its colour.

What appears on the screen is what people see. Everything else is just interpretation.

There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone's person.

The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

In a way, it's like the photographer always has his vision of me. The pictures that I'm known for are not really my image, they're always the photographer's vision of me. I can look a hundred different ways, but what people see of me in pictures is not really my image.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

There is always a divergence between our perception and what actually exists.

Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.

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

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.

I've also learned from [Dalai Lama] that we make the world by how we choose to look at it. In any situation you can make it constructive or dismaying, depending on that powerful computer we call the mind.

...it is fifty percent what they see, and fifty percent what they think they see.

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.

How we see the world changes all the time. It all depends on our mood.

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.