Annie Dillard Quotes

Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.

At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of experiencing, or, to speak more generally, processes of intuiting that grasp the object in the original.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.

In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them.

The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.

Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.

Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see.

Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.

What you can imagine depends on what you know.

There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can dispel mind.

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Colour, Figure, Motion, Extension and the like, considered only so many Sensations in the Mind, are perfectly known, there being nothing in them which is not perceived. But if they are looked on as notes or Images, referred to Things or Archetypes existing without the Mind, then are we involved all in Scepticism.

There is no order of things except in the human mind.

It's pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don't actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what's going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings.

The mind, in discovering truths, acts in the same manner as it acts through the eye in discovering objects; when once any object has been seen, it is impossible to put the mind back to the same condition it was in before it saw it.

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world colour and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I call "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind.

In reality, our mind is the creator of all the things we experience.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

The essential functions of the mind consist in understanding and in inventing, in other words, in building up structures by structuring reality.