Isaac Marion Quotes

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

It's marvellous, marvellous! Nothing will ever be as much fun. I'm going to photograph everything, everything!

I'm always mentally photographing everything as practice.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. Zen practice is to open up our small mind.

I vaguely remember doing [all my] photo sessions, but definitely there were some surprises there for me.

The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.

The price of seeing is silence.

To look at a thing is very different from seeing it.

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.

All the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice.

And never forget, there is memory.

We cannot empty the mind by thinking. Only by observation.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

Use all of your senses.

I think everything is happening all the time, but if you don't put yourself in the path of it, you miss it.

Wait. Look. Notice. If you keep those three words in mind, you just might survive the next few days.

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.

He must have driven this way countless times, and yet he had no memory of the scenery. He must have been so caught up in the day's agenda, and arriving punctually at their destination, that the land beyond the car had been no more than a wash of one green, and a backdrop of one hill. Life was very different when you walked through it.

The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.

When anything is present to the mind, what is the very first and simplest character to be noted in it, in every case, no matter how little elevated the object may be? Certainly, it is its presentness .

I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered that I didn't need to. If the thing is true, why there it is.

If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens.

Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.