Henry David Thoreau Quotes

The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is second.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

The mind is the seat of perception of the things we see, hear, and feel. It is through the mind that we see the beauties of the earth and sky, or music, of art, in fact, of everything. That silent shuttle of thought working in and out through cell and nerve weaves into one harmonious whole the myriad moods of mind, and we call it life.

What happens behind your eyes is more important than what happens in front of them. This is a reversal from the way that we have been taught and the way that we had experienced the world as five sensory humans.

To see is to think, and to think is to see.

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

The mind's capacity is limitless, and its manifestations are inexhaustible. Seeing forms with your eyes, hearing sounds with your ears, smelling odors with your nose, tasting flavors with your tongue, every movement or state is all your mind.

Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.

We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

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.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.

The eye is the most refined of our senses, the one which communicates most directly with our mind, our consciousness.

When I see a colour or hear a sound, I am aware of something, and not of nothing.

We live on the leash of our senses.

What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes.

Comprehension follows perception.

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.

Film is a game of projections upon projections, and the projected image on the screen is a game of light and shadows. There is nothing there; it is the brain that is decoding those things. The film doesn't have any decipherable kind of meaning if it's not seen.

Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.

When I was younger, I didn't even realize the way I think visually is different.

How do we see physically? No differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.