Shaping Reality Quotes

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live-that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values-that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind.

Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it

Speech is my hammer bang the world into shape now let it fall - HUNGH

The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.

I don't think the media is a reflection of anything. The media is an active political and pedagogical force that shapes reality. If the media were a reflection of anything, then we'd have to raise the question of why it's in the hands of basically six corporations. The media is about power.

A world grows up around me. Am I shaping it, or do its predetermined contours guide my hand?

There are no forms in nature. Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You as an artist create configurations out of chaos. You make a formal statement where there was none to begin with. All art is a combination of an external event and an internal event… I make a photograph to give you the equivalent of what I felt. Equivalent is still the best word.

Therefore, I feel convinced that any political picture can be changed to suit the needs of the powers that be.

Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.

Can art be completely invented? It's a matter of shaping reality with the help of imagination.

We are today beginning to see work by very reputable scientists that says the universe is created by our observations. It is not a coincidence; we are actively involved in physically shaping the world that we experience.

The circumstances with which every thing in this world is begirt, give every thing in this world its size and shape;--and by tightening it, or relaxing it, this way or that, make the thing to be, what it is--great--little--good--bad--indifferent or not indifferent, just as the case happens.

There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse if often closer to the truth. Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies.

Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.

What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.

These are the times, the times of our own, these are the shapes the world we formed.

Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes.

We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.

Many of the things that shape the way the world looks are, quite frankly, invisible.

We are taught what reality is in all kinds of ways.

So persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of possibilities.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.