Creative Perception Quotes

The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time.

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

My artistic manifesto exists in the world as poetry. So even though most of the things that I've done have been on other people's projects or could be pigeonholed in certain ways, that's not how I perceive myself.

How could Michelangelo have seen his David in a block of marble? Man began to make images only because he discovered them nearly formed around him, already within reach. He saw them in a bone, in the bumps of a cave, in a piece of wood. One form suggested a woman to him, another a buffalo, still another the head of a monster.

Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.

The eye of the poet sees less clearly, but sees farther than the eye of the scientist.

Philosophy... is the creative perception by the spirit of the meaning of human existence.

I'm personally more struck by visual things more than musical.

There are people who don't respond to color. That's what painting is. It's color.

The beauty of music is that everyone hears it their own way, and every song you hear leaves an impression on you that alters the way you hear everything from that point on.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

True dreams and visions should be as visible to the artist as the phenomena of the objective world.

Creative people see Prometheus in a mirror, never Pandora.

Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.

Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that.

Art doesn't reflect what we see; it makes us see.

The way it works for me is my sight and sound senses are combined. Every sound I associate with a color and every color I associate with a sound... The way I see things is constant streamers across the room, bouncing off from every touch and every sound. Over the years, I've learned what color palates I love most.

Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.

We are able to feel and learn very quickly through music, through art, through poetry some spiritual things that we would otherwise learn very slowly.

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

The artist is not a man who describes, but a man who feels.

The average man cannot believe that an artist may be as serious and highminded an observer of life as the professed man of science.

I began to wonder - I knew I was an artist or wanted to be one - but I was wondering whether I really was an artist. I was doing such ordinary things that I could feel the difference. Most people would look at those things and say, 'Well, that's nothing. What did you do that for? That's just a wreck of a car or a wreck of a man. That's nothing. That isn't art.' They don't say that anymore.

A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.