Pure Perception Quotes

When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture.

How sad if we pass through life and never see it with the eyes of a child.

He returns years later, has no demands. He wants only one, most precious thing: To see, purely and simply, without name, Without expectations, fears, or hopes, At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

The world was beautiful when looked at in this way-without any seeking, so simple, so childlike.

Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time; in its right, authentic colors; without making comparisons. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no remembrance of the past.

When the child was a child, it didn’t know that it was a child, everything was soulful, and all souls were one.

There is an art of seeing things as they are: without naming, without being caught in a network of words, without thinking interfering with perception.

Childhood often holds a truth with its feeble finger, which the grasp of manhood cannot retain,--which it is the pride of utmost age to recover.

The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

As the most recently arrived to earthly life, children can seem in lingering possession of some heavenly lidless eye.

And that's what innocence is. It's simple and trusting like a child, not judgmental and committed to one narrow point of view. If you are locked into a pattern of thinking and responding, your creativity gets blocked. You miss the freshness and magic of the moment. Learn to be innocent again, and that freshness never fades.

Is it possible to observe without the observer?

In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.

And this do I call immaculate perception of all things: to want nothing else from them, but to be allowed to lie before them as a mirror with a hundred facets.

There is so much truth in children and so little self-consciousness. It always strikes me that they are so capable of losing and finding themselves and also losing and finding those things they feel close to.

The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate a work of art, we must bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions.

The child and the great artist -- these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.

When our minds as people normally starts to wrap around things, we start to attach all these ideas to it that really aren't that necessary to the core of it, if you just experience it and kind of go through it.

We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.

What is thematically posited is only what is given, by pure reflection, with all its immanent essential moments absolutely as it is given to pure reflection.

Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child.

The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky.

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man.