Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

You always have to stimulate the senses.

I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I have not the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature.

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

I learned in the computer game business early on that all senses are not equal. The best example is, you're listening to a radio play and you're driving down the road, and suddenly you realize you haven't seen the road in five minutes. It's because your visual cortex has been partying with your imagination, basically.

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.

I'm not saying I talk to cartoon characters all the time, but the characters are very real to me. In a very non-insane way.

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.

The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded.

A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.

Imagination is strong in a man when that particular function of the brain which enables him to observe is roused to activity without any necessary excitement of the sense. Accordingly, we find that imagination is active just in proportion as our sense are not excited by external objects. A long period of solitude, whether in prison or in a sick room; quiet, twilight, darkness-these are the things that promote its activity; and under their influence it comes into play of itself.

There is a great probability that our loss of capacity for enjoying the positive joys of life is largely due to the decreased sensibility of our senses and our lack of full use of them. All human happiness is sensuous happiness.

A wine goes in my mouth, and I just see it. I see it in three dimensions. The textures. The flavours. The smells. They jump out at me. When I put my nose in a glass, it's like tunnel vision. I move into another world, where everything around me is gone, and every bit of mental energy is focused on that wine.

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?

I think that in general it is a good plan occasionally to bear in mind the fact that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis.

After a while he played with the pencil and the paper again and was delighted when he discovered how to make a mark with the one on the other. Various noises continued outside, but he didn't know whether they were real or not. He then talked to his table for a week to see how it would react.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

It’s mostly just you have to convince yourself that there’s nothing else in the room but John Lennon and suddenly things start John Lennon-ing!

The exercise of all the senses is as intense pleasure, as anyone will find, who recovers the use of one after being deprived of it.

He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea.

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

Imagination, that dost so abstract us That we are not aware, not even when A thousand trumpets sound about our ears!

I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the same time.

All power of fancy over reason is a degree of madness.