Ry Cooder Quotes

Much of the way we understand the world is through images. That's what I think good art does - it teaches you how to see the historical moment that you live in.

You have to think not about what you mean but about what people hear.

Images are really powerful. People fall in love with images, and as a way of falling in love with someone because they're like an image.

There aren't twelve-hundred people in the world who understand pictures. The others pretend and don't care.

I've had moments where I've met people who were complete, like, idiots, who could not understand visual culture to save their lives.

Education, if it means anything, should not take people away from the land, but instill in them even more respect for it, because educated people are in a position to understand what is being lost. The future of the planet concerns all of us, and all of us should do what we can to protect it. As I told the foresters, and the women, you don't need a diploma to plant a tree.

All I'm saying is that you should show some respect for what other people see with their eyes and feel with their fingers, even though it be the exact opposite.

Or perhaps all those things you missed upon first glance mean much more than you could ever guess.

And if we could get the local leaders to appreciate their responsibility for the environment then they would be able to explain that responsibility to the people of their faith.

As human beings, why does it take somebody to feel like they're close to us for us to see their humanity? Why can't we see the humanity in people that are distant from us?

When I say: "I'm looking at you, I can see you", that means: "I can see you because I can't see what is behind you: I see you through the frame I am drawing. I can't see inside you". If I could see you from beneath or from behind, I would be God. I can see you because my back and my sides are blind. One can't even imagine what it would be like to see inside people.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.

I can only be the best version of myself and understand that the only way that we as a people can heal is to understand that the next person's journey may not be your own, but it doesn't mean that you have to marginalize them in any way.

Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.

The originator of a new concept...finds, as a rule, that it is much more difficult to find out why other people do not understand him, than it was to discover the new truth.

Other people have to understand where we are coming from, including our allies. Our allies have taken advantage of us.

You know, two people can say exactly the same words, saying the same story, and it would mean something entirely different.

When people talk to me about the weather, I always feel they mean something else.

I had this wonderful, supportive mother who didn't get mad because of all the earth mucking up my bed. She just said they'd die - they needed the earth.

Graeme Smith is capable of reading other people's heads.

Happy," I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception – especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far to relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.

There is a world of difference between facts and the truth. You can have so many facts that you don't deal with the truth. You never get to the truth. You have the places where, the people who, the times when, the reasons why, the methods how - blah blah. And never get to the human truth. The human truth is as elusive as the air. And as important as the air.

Because we [people] have an intellect, part of what we do is try to understand the "intelligent design." Everything we don't know is "intelligent design." Everything we do know is science.

I think that, like anything, people take their image and what they want somebody else to be and then people just run with it. And when you really know the person and really love the person, you recognize that that person is nothing like that.

Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge