Wallace Stevens Quotes

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

We believe what we see.’...What do you do when you’re in the dark?

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.

Small minds cannot grasp great subjects.

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

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

Light comes to us by the sensibility. Without visual sensibility there is no light, no movement.

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.

I was fascinated with optical illusions.

Reality: What a concept!

I think as a species we're not designed to be able to think more than one year into the future - if that. Even trying to imagine one year from now makes most people feel like they've been given a huge boring chunk of homework that's too hard to do.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

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.

Perception and reality are two different things.

Don’t see the mind for more than it is, but don’t misread it for all that it can be.

A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced

Sight is subjective. We learned that in class.

We find certains things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.

Small minds can never handle great themes.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

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

[L]et my reader who is puzzled by my awkward explanations close his eyes for no more than two minutes, and see if he does not find himself suddenly not a compact human being at all, but only a consciousness on a sea of sound and touch . . .

There are minds constructed like the eyes of certain insects, which discern, with admirable distinctness, the most delicate lineaments and finest veins of the leaf which bears them, but are totally unable to take in the ensemble of the plant or shrub. When error has effected an entrance into such minds, it remains there impregnable, because no general view assists them in throwing off the chance impression of the moment.