James Turrell Quotes

We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?

The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact.

How do you know, right now, that you are aware of being aware, or conscious?

Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.

Life is a state of consciousness.

Life is but thought.

If you pay attention to the world, it's an amazing place. If you don't, it's whatever you think it is.

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

The world is not outside you.

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

Pause now to ask yourself the following question: 'Am I dreaming or awake, right now?' Be serious, really try to answer the question to the best of your ability and be ready to justify your answer.

Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.

For a sorcerer, reality, or the world as we all know it, is only a description.

If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.

We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.

That which is not present in deep dreamless sleep is not real

In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.

There is but one world common for those who are awake, but when men are asleep, each turns away into a world of his own.

Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.

Awareness means grasping life just the way it is, without contamination by mental projections.

Consciousness ... is the phenomenon whereby the universe's very existence is made known.