Douglas Adams Quotes

99 percent of what you see is not what comes in through the eyes. It is what you infer about that room.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.

Magic's about understanding - and then manipulating - how viewers digest the sensory information.

I think that cognitive scientists would support the view that our visual system does not directly represent what is out there in the world and that our brain constructs a lot of the imagery that we believe we are seeing.

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

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

Your perception of the world is ... really a fabrication of your model of the world. You don't really see light or sound. You perceive it because your model says this is how the world is, and those patterns invoke the model. It's hard to believe, but it really is true.

While just looking, we are always hunting among objects, looking for what we desire or fear, endeavoring to recognize some pattern; on the other hand, objects themselves always "stare back," vie for our attention, throw at us their lures and endeavor to entrap us.

A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.

What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes.

What we think about Paris is a part of how we feel about it. Our idea of Paris is our idea and we don't know that that's not necessarily the way it really is. It feels so real.

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

Film is a game of projections upon projections, and the projected image on the screen is a game of light and shadows. There is nothing there; it is the brain that is decoding those things. The film doesn't have any decipherable kind of meaning if it's not seen.

Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.

What appears on the screen is what people see. Everything else is just interpretation.

Reality is mind-made.

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

I discover vision, not as a 'thinking about seeing,' to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.

We never see a tree except through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. Look at a tree and you will find how extraordinarily difficult it is to see it completely, so that no image, no screen, comes between the seeing and the actual fact. By completely I mean with the totality of your mind and heart, not a fragment of it.

The senses don't just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern.