Subjective Perception Quotes

None of us see the world as it is but as we are, as our frames of reference, or maps, define the territory.

You don't know reality until someone makes a fiction of it. Reality needs the completion of fiction.

Our intelligence is always imperfect.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life" -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

Popularity's a weird thing. You can't really define it, and it's not cool to talk about, but you know it when you see it. Like a lazy eye, or porn.

It is not events that disturb the minds of men, but the view they take of them.

Art is always in the eyes of the beholder. Only posterity has the right to point out our mistakes.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

Anything that exists on the human palette is, from my point of view, fair game for artists to portray. You don't have to go see it if you don't want to, so don't go.

It was good, it was bad. But it was real, and that's all you have.

Beauty stands In the admiration only of weak minds Led captive.

It isn't safe to sit in judgment upon another person's illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.

The claim that everybody sees the world differently is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim.

Like a mirror, God appears to be more and more a reflection of whoever it is that happens to be talking about God at the moment.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.

In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.

Leadership is like beauty - it's hard to define but you know it when you see it.

The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.