Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Media, the plural of mediocrity.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values

Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity).

Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.

You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

When something like this happens, you suddenly have no sense of reality at all. You have lost a piece of your past. The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was. It becomes impossible to look back at anything that's happened ... without wondering what was really going on.

The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.

How does it happen that something that makes so much sense in the moonlight doesn't make any sense at all in the sunlight?

A work of art is an echo chamber which repeats what people say about it.

Because you have seen something doesn't mean you can explain it. Differing interpretations will always abound, even when good minds come to bear. The kernel of indisputable information is a dot in space; interpretations grow out of the desire to make this point a line, to give it direction. The directions in which it can be sent, the uses to which it can be put by a culturally, professionally, and geographically diverse society are almost without limit. The possibilities make good scientists chary.

Watt's concern, deep as it appeared, was not after all what the figure was, in reality, but with what the figure appeared to be, in reality.

A letter is a risky thing; the writer gambles on the reader's frame of mind.

Reality is a question of perspective.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

The modern reader (or viewer, or listener: let's include everybody) is perilously overloaded. His attention is, to use the latest lingo,'targeted' by powerful forces? Our consciousness is a staging area, a field of operations for all kinds of enterprises, which make free use of it.

Language is like drinking from one's own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at the time.

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

The birds did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.

The cards always look different when it's your turn to play them; loaded with subtly different possibilities.

Perception is a selective act of attention and interpretation.