Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Awareness is becoming acquainted with environment, no matter where one happens to be.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

We are what we see. We are products of our surroundings.

Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction.

Your connections to all the things around you literally define who you are.

Perception rules the world. Everyone knows that. Where we live and where we're from, you just can't escape it.

to know a piece of grass, you’ve got to see the ground that grew it. Maybe that’s why I remember every detail of that night, every inch of ground we covered, as I followed Zach to the place that had made him, seeing them both with fresh eyes.

I'm a product of my environment.

Awareness is becoming acquainted with environment, no matter where one happens to be. Man does not suddenly become aware or infused with wonder; it is something we are born with.

Fish don't know much about water, and people didn't know much about air.

Know what is behind you, and pay particular attention to anything out of place.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.

Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.

In new situations, I look carefully at appearances. In familiar ones, I glance.

What happens in the present moment? In the present moment, you are producing thought, speech, and action. And they continue in the world.

Circumstances alter faces.

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.

What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.

Greatness depends on where you are coming from.

The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.

You can't be conscious unless you have variable receptors... When people say the way I see the world is the way it is - that's ridiculous. We can only see it depending on the quality of our receptors and background.

That's all a writer has to write about - what he sees and hears and what not.

In thinking of light, if we can think about what it can do, and what it is, by thinking about itself, not about what we wanted it to do for other things, because again we've used light as people might be used, in the sense that we use it to light paintings. We use it to light so that we can read. We don't really pay much attention to the light itself. And so turning that and letting light and sound speak for itself is that you figure out these different relationships and rules.

It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it