Adrienne Rich Quotes

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

We say seeing is believing, but actually, we are much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe all the time and occasionally seeing what we can't believe

To look is one thing, to see is another thing; to see is very difficult, normally; to look is to try to see. I have looked and I hope I have seen.

Seeing is in itself a movement.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend

Photographs don't 'reveal' much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see.

The price of seeing is silence.

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.

I've always been able to see you," I say. "It's a rather lovely view.

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray.

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.

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

To see is to think, and to think is to see.

The whole life lies in the verb seeing.

Seeing is a neglected enterprise.

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

Don't let your eyes refuse to seeDon't let your ears refuse to hear

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

My work is about your seeing. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light -- it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing.

Knowing it and seeing it are two different things.

We do not know what things look like. We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing,this seeing. -Aunt Beast

The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.

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

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.