Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

What we see, we see and seeing is changing

You think you're looking at things all the time, but you're not looking at things, you're looking at what your brain is interpreting through light and color. And who knows what everybody else sees?

What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.

You wish to see; listen. Hearing is a step toward Vision.

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

The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.

The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the color which common sense says they 'really' have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear.

I should say that I am a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or rarely, with my ears... to my constant regret.

Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe.

We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.

How often do we do that, he wondered--look at someone and fail to see what's really there?

I see all of them. All the colors.

An object is frequently not seen, from not knowing how to see it, rather than from any defect of the organ of vision.

Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.

We animate what we can see, and we see only what we animate.

Sinnes are not knowne till they bee acted.

I open my eyes and my ears, and that’s why I work.

A town, a landscape are when seen from afar a town and a landscape; but as one gets nearer, there are houses, trees, tiles leaves, grasses, ants, legs of ants and so on to infinity. All this is subsumed under the name of landscape.

I can only draw what I see.

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

I am a visual man. I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes.

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.