David Hockney Quotes

Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.

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.

I see the world through my eyes. It's sometimes a strange world.

I know that people have different ways to see me but I'm used to it.

I think anything you listen to is going to be different.

The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.

There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food.

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

None of us see the world as it is but as we are, as our frames of reference, or maps, define the territory.

My sense of reality and logic is different from most people's.

What people are perceiving will dictate what their life and ultimately what your interaction is.

I'm trying to get more into other things, where reality is nothing but each individual's way of thinking.

I had the feeling . . . that my experience was very different from other people’s. (Are we all under this illusion?)

Anybody doing something brings something to it. It's not for me to say if it's "growth". Just by the nature of everyone has a different take on the material. Some people would.

The tendency of our perceptions is to emphasise increasingly the objective elements in an impression, unless we have some special reason, as artists have, for doing the opposite.

What amazes me is that you can have 10 different photographers in the same room, and you see 10 different rooms. You realize how much of it is the person's perspective rather than the situation itself.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

We see the world through the lens of all our experiences; that is a fundamental part of the human condition.

Our experience of many life circumstances is a function of our personal perspective and not the circumstance itself.

Beauty is altogether in the eye of the beholder.

I write in order to express what the photo itself cannot say. A photograph of my father doesn't tell me what I thought of him, which for me is much more important than what the man looked like.

As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.

Every person's remembering will be different. That engagement is important, I think.