Visual Cognition Quotes

The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is second.

The question is not what you look at – but how you look & whether you see.

I think seeing happens partly through the eyes, but not entirely.

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

Sight is a faculty; seeing is an art.

Colour could give rise to sensations which would interfere with our conception of space.

The art of watching has become mere skill at rapid apperception and understanding of continuously changing visual images. The younger generation has acquired this cinematic perception to an amazing degree.

Sight is by much the noblest of the senses. We receive our notices from the other four, through the organs of sensation only. We hear, we feel, we smell, we taste, by touch. But sight rises infinitely higher. It is refined above matter, and equals the faculty of spirit.

Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.

My entire learning process is slow, because I have no visual memory.

I'm very interested in how we read things, especially the link between seeing two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, because of how I read.

Seeing is in some respect an art, which must be learnt.

Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking. But who looks? If people could see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it's because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.

The eye doesn't see any shapes, it sees only what is differentiated through light and dark or through colors.

A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.

Without claiming superiority of intellectual over visual understanding, one is nevertheless bound to admit that the cinema allowsa number of æsthetic-intellectual means of perception to remain unexercised which cannot but lead to a weakening of judgment.

The eyes have a property in things and territories not named in any title-deeds, and are the owners of our choicest possessions.

Pictures are not incidental frills to a text; they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.

The eye and brain are not like a fax machine, nor are there little people looking at the images coming in.

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

Without images we can neither think nor understand anything.

No, I don't read the papers. I just look at the pictures.

I should say that I am a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or rarely, with my ears... to my constant regret.

Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.