Robert Shaw Quotes

To understand something, whether we are aware of it or not, depends on choosing a model. We get to understand what we see by comparing it with something else, something that we think we understand better. But what we compare it with turns out to have a huge influence on the outcome.

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

We think we receive all that we perceive, but in fact, we actually give the sky its colour.

Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see.

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.

Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

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.

How do we see physically? No differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.

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.

Speech is like cloth of Arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth appear in figure; whereas in thoughts they lie but as packs.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

The reality we live in is selected by our conceptual definitions. You and I may be in the same physical space, but each of us will see it as entirely different.

To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.

If intelligence were a television set, it would be an early black-and-white model with poor reception, so that much of the picture was gray and the figures on the screen were snowy and indistinct. You could fiddle with the knobs all you wanted, but unless you were careful, what you would see often depended more on what you expected or hoped to see than on what was really there.

People seen by the mind are exactly different to things seen by the eye. They grow smaller and smaller as you come nearer down to them, whereas things become bigger.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.

The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

The moment you label something, you take a step-I mean, you can never go back again to seeing it unlabelled.

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

And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.