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I have taught my students not to apply rules or mechanical ways of seeing. (Josef Albers)
You see it and you don't see it, and you don't see it and you see it... (Bill Alexander)
Our art tends to be more real when we concentrate on what we actually see with our eyes and with our instincts. It becomes difficult and cumbersome when we are busy trying to figure out what we're supposed to be seeing. (Lyn Asselta)
It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ. (W. H. Auden)
If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy. (Richard Avedon)
The better an artist can mimic how the eye sees, the more effective and natural the paintings will be. (Kenn Backhaus)
My approach to the painting process is to trust my eyes, not my mind. (Kenn Backhaus)
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye. (Honore de Balzac)
Without the eye, the head is blind. Without the head, the eye is adrift. (Darby Bannard)
If we see an object as a 'bowl,' it may inhibit seeing it as 'craft,' just as seeing it as 'craft' might inhibit seeing it as 'art.' See first; name later. (Darby Bannard)
-Canadian writer...
We bounce between looking and talking... words are autopsies of seeing... In the best cases, these perceptual post-mortems can sharpen our understanding of what must have occurred in the moments of seeing, including clues about how and why seeing stopped... and, when they reach their limit, they provoke the viewer into more looking. (Michael Barnes)
It is essential to an architect to know how to see: I mean to see in such a way that the vision is not overpowered by rational analysis. (Luis Barragan)
You begin paying more attention to what you're seeing when you know the names... If you don't know the names of plant and animal species that share your neighbourhood, you don't care about them and can't protect biodiversity. (Robert Bateman)
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars. (Charles A. Beard)
I could paint these mountains the way they look, but it isn't how I see them. (Justin Beckett)
We draw best that which is most familiar to us; we see best that which is new to us. (Brenda Behr)
My spirit has ways of seeing that my eyes cannot comprehend. (Philippe Benichou)
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. (John Berger)
What is art but a way of seeing? (Thomas Berger)
The eye only sees in each thing that for which it looks, and it only looks for that thing of which it already has an idea. (Alphonse Bertillon)
- My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut...
Eyes can only capture objects that already seen in mind. And mind can only see things that already written in heart. (Toba Beta)
To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour. (William Blake)
As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers. (William Blake)
The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing. (Pierre Bonnard)
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. (Pierre Bonnard)
To see far is one thing, going there is another. (Constantin Brancusi)
Perspective starts from one viewpoint and never gets away from it. But the viewpoint is quite unimportant. It is though someone were to draw profiles all his life, leading people to think that a man has only one eye... (Georges Braque)
Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details – the colour of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. (Benjamin Britten)
The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter - in the eye. (Charlotte Bronte)
Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye. (H. Jackson Brown, Jr.)
I see the whole design. (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
Don't try to describe the ocean if you've never seen it. (Jimmy Buffett)
'Seeing' is the talent - seeing within, seeing what can be, seeing what is. This 'seeing' could take 2 seconds or 2 years. (Gail Caduff-Nash)
One looks, looks long, and the world comes in. (Joseph Campbell)
If you don't know how to look, you'll end up putting down the wrong things, which only dilutes or cancels the power of your artwork. (George L. Carlson)
It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see. (Thomas Carlyle)
Indian Art broadened my seeing, loosened the formal tightness I had learned in England's schools. Its bigness and stark reality baffled my white man's understanding... I had been schooled to see outsides only, not struggle to pierce. (Emily Carr)
Trust your eye: if you see light, paint it. If a composition is predominately in shade, perhaps that's where your eye goes and burning out light areas is warranted. (Mike Carroll)
One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, 'What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?' (Rachel Carson)
One eye looks within, the other eye looks without. (Henri Cartier-Bresson)
Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes. (Henri Cartier-Bresson)
People don't use their eyes. They never see a bird, they see a sparrow. They never see a tree, they see a birch. They see concepts. (Joyce Cary)
The eyes those silent tongues of love. (Miguel de Cervantes)
One must see one's model correctly and experience it in the right way; and furthermore express oneself forcibly and with distinction. (Paul Cezanne)
-on Claude Monet...
Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye! (Paul Cezanne)
I'm more interested in seeing what the material tells me than in imposing my will on it. (John Chamberlain)
The whole life lies in the verb seeing. (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)
Do not imagine that I would disregard that thing that lies beneath the mask... but be sure that when the outside is rightly seen, the thing that lies under the surface will be found upon your canvas. (William Merritt Chase)
I have the feeling that I've seen everything, but failed to notice the elephants. (Anton Chekhov)
If you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it for the 1000th time, you are in danger of seeing it for the first time. (G. K. Chesterton)
Everything has two aspects: the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction. (Giorgio de Chirico)
I believe, however, that such abnormal moments can be found in everyone, and it is all the more fortunate when they occur in individuals with creative talent or with clairvoyant powers. (Giorgio de Chirico)
The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
No amount of mental prejudice can prevent the eye from passing a sound judgment on two patches of tone placed in immediate juxtaposition. (John Collier)
-b.1885 d.1950...
See things as you would have them be, instead of as they are. (Robert Collier)
What the eye does not see, the heart does not rue. (Mary Collyer)
Seeing is such a privilege. Who notices the way the screech of a gull looks, the look of a gale, the sight of some fragrance? (Keith Crown)
We ordinary people can see neither our own eyelashes, which are so close, nor the heavens in the distance... (Nichiren Daishonin)
What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen... to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust. (Salvador Dali)
We do not see with our eyes, but through them. (Ken Danby)
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. (Charles Darwin)
What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways. (Richard Dawkins)
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. (Edgar Degas)
Send home my long strayed eyes to me, / Which too long have dwelt on thee. (John Donne)
Caterpillar sheds his skin to find a butterfly within. / First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. (Donovan)
You see through love, and that deludes your sight, / As what is straight seems crooked through the water. (John Dryden)
There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body's sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers forever. (Alexandre Dumas)
-standing in a field at night...
Everything I can't see / is at least as real as what I can. (Stephen Dunn)
Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head, / Pretending he just doesn't see? (Bob Dylan)
A painter should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within himself. (C. W. Eckersberg)
Seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. (James Elkins)
All seeing, I think, is painful. Every photograph is a little sting, a hurt inflicted in its subject, but even more: every glance hurts in some way, freezing and condensing what's seen into something that it is not. (James Elkins)
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked. (Ralph Ellison)
People only see what they are prepared to see. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me - I am part or parcel of God. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
When you focus with soul eyes, / You will see home in many, many places. (Clarissa Pinkola Estes)
Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. (Walker Evans)
I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered I didn't need to. If the thing is there, why, there it is. (Walker Evans)
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel, my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. (Richard Feynman)
I feel as though I haven't seen an object until I actually start painting it. (Janet Fish)
We do a lot of looking: we look through lenses, telescopes, television tubes...Our looking is perfected every day, but we see less and less. (Frederick Franck)
We can never see the world other than incompletely: deliberately to see it as incomplete is to create an artistic aspect. (Egon Friedell)
Close your bodily eye, that you may see your picture first with the eye of the spirit. Then bring to light what you have seen in the darkness, that its effect may work back, from without to within. (Caspar David Friedrich)
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. (Mahatma Gandhi)
I shut my eyes in order to see. (Paul Gauguin)
The Canadian painter A. Y. Jackson noted that 'failure of sight' was a tiresome problem. He meant we should be able to look at our work-in-progress as if it were previously unseen. (Robert Genn)
It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see. (Alberto Giacometti)
When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss. (Alberto Giacometti)
-Stumbling on Happiness...
To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion. (Daniel T. Gilbert)
Each one sees what he carries in his heart. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
The hardest thing to see is what is in front of our eyes. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Seeing nothing one sees everything. (Josh Goldberg)
Go see it and see for yourself why you shouldn't go see it. (Samuel Goldwyn)
Seeing depends on knowledge / And knowledge, of course, on your college / But when you are erudite and wise / What matters is to use your eyes. (Ernst Gombrich)
People follow shapes and masses of colour and rarely look with the same attention at an object once it is set in our memory. We 'see' by symbols. (Raul Gonzalez)
Moving closer I get lost in the breathtaking detail, going in and out of focus, feeling the eye as a muscle. Some forms dissolve and new shapes, colors and patterns take on a mesmerizing life of their own. (Alexander Gorlizki)
See the planes of light as shapes, the planes of shadows as shapes. Squint your eyes and find the big, fluent shapes. (Irwin Greenberg)
First the dog, then the fleas. (George De Groat)
The painter draws with his eyes, not with his hands. Whatever he sees, if he sees it clear, he can put down. The putting of it down requires, perhaps, much care and labor, but no more muscular agility than it takes for him to write his name. Seeing clear is the important thing. (Maurice Grosser)
Probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realize it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible. (Philip Guston)
-About Color Photography,1961...
Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view. Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. (Ernst Haas)
Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory. (Kendall Hailey)
An artist sees things not as they are, but as he is. (Robert Beverly Hale)
Look, look, look, look, look! (Richard Halliday)
See like a laser, focus like a laser, but paint like a myopic librarian. Remember, Monet painted his best creative work while he was almost blind. (Andrew Hamilton)
It is never difficult to see images - when the principle of the image is embedded in the soul. (Marsden Hartley)
Paint what you see, not what you know. (Charles Hawthorne)
The 'how' has a great effect on what we see. To say that 'what we see' is more important than 'how we see it' is to think that 'how' has been settled and fixed. When you realize this is not the case, you realize that 'how' often affects 'what' we see. (David Hockney)
The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldn't necessarily be. (David Hockney)
How difficult it is to learn not to see like cameras, which has had such an effect on us. The camera sees everything at once. We don't. (David Hockney)
Some things have to be believed to be seen. (Ralph Hodgson)
The eyes are unable to report instantly to the mind everything they see in a painting, so they will move quickly over the simple, large shapes of dark and light first... Without... visual excitement, the eyes won't wish to report much information to the mind... (Jane R. Hofstetter)
We have two ways of seeing: a learned intelligent way that evolved because it gave our ancestors a greater chance of survival, and an inherent instinctive way that produces an emotive and original sensation of what we see. The way we are born to see therefore subdues our powers of perception. (Christopher John Hollins)
When a good poet looks at an object with the eyes in his head, he sees more than merely accurately. (John Andrew Holmes)
You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. (Sherlock Holmes)
When you paint, try to put down exactly what you see. Whatever else you have to offer will come out anyway. (Winslow Homer)
As long as you do not hold a balance between your seeing of things and your execution, you will do nothing that is really good. (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres)
I am not content to paint just what I see. I want to improve on it. (Philip Jamieson)
Fundamentally, art is a way of seeing rather than of doing or making. (Alan Jarvis)
You don't need eyes to see, you need vision. (Maxi Jazz)
Blink and you missed it! (Anthony Mars Jenkins)
Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. (Jasper Johns)
I like Wyeth's comment about things seen out of the corner of the eye. I know what he means, as some of the best work I have done is of subjects I almost didn't see. (Brian Johnson)
Close your eyes and you will see. (Joseph Joubert)
The eye is a very quick instrument, much quicker than the ear. The eye gets it immediately. (Anish Kapoor)
I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a man-made world. (Helen Keller)
Why let what you see get in the way? (Joyce Kellock)
- Big Sur...
I see as much as doors'll allow, open or shut. (Jack Kerouac)
Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph. (Andre Kertesz)
Your eyes are like gates, and images can be used to enter into your thinking. (Daniel J. Keys)
The beholder's eye, which moves like an animal grazing, follows paths prepared for it in the picture. (Paul Klee)
Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see. (Paul Klee)
One eye sees, the other feels. (Paul Klee)
We look at many things and never see; art is seeing and feeling. (Dee Knott)
Open your eyes at last and see... now I will open the book of the world for you; there are no words in it, just pictures. (Oskar Kokoschka)
Content is a glimpse. (Willem de Kooning)
We never see anything completely... We never see a tree, we see the tree through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
One who returns to a place sees it with new eyes. Although the place may not have changed, the viewer inevitably has. For the first time things invisible before become suddenly visible. (Louis L'Amour)
This benefit of seeing... can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image... the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate. (Dorothea Lange)
The secret of 'fusion' is the fact that the artist's eye sees in nature... an inexhaustible wealth of tension, rhythms, continuities, and contrasts which can be rendered in line and color. (Suzanne Langer)
The ability to truly see, to look at this earth as a painting waiting to be born through our fingers, is what separates us artists from the rest of humanity. (Mary Lapos)
If you see a whole thing – it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. (Ursula K. LeGuin)
Would that we could at once paint with the eyes. In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost! (Gotthold Lessing)
Squint a lot. (Robert Levers)
My work isn't about form. It's about seeing. I'm excited about seeing things, and I'm interested in the way I think other people see things. (Roy Lichtenstein)
The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes. (Walter Lippmann)
I can't teach you to be an artist; all I can do is help you learn to see. (J. P. Loveless)
A weed is no more than a flower in disguise, / Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes. (James Russell Lowell)
What we see depends mainly on what we look for. (John Lubbock)
It takes time to really see. Seeing is in itself an art. Perhaps that is what art is, the crystalization of a vision. (Mary Jean Mailloux)
What a life, seeing! (John Marin)
Drawing is the process of looking made visible. (Mick Maslen)
Take a moment to think... See – logically. (Doris McCarthy)
Any fool can learn how to paint. The trick is to learn how to see. (Dorothy McCarthy)
As a synesthete, the music I hear is translated into a flow of texture and colors. Synethesia, although not disorientating, can sometimes leave me at odds trying to describe what I can see to others. (Melissa S. McCracken)
Drawing makes you look intently, and with purpose. It makes you see differently. (Richard McDaniel)
There will always be those who must look into the dark in order to see. (Alan McGlashan)
I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it. (Marshall McLuhan)
Seeing is a gift that comes with practice. (Stephanie Mills)
With one eye you are looking at the outside world, while with the other you are looking within yourself. (Amedeo Modigliani)
Every period has its own optical focus. (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy)
We have - through a hundred years of photography and two decades of film - been enormously enriched... We may say we see the world with entirely different eyes. (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy)
Seeing is looking at something in saturation. But we tend to look at something for, say, 1/30 of a second. (Guido Molinari)
Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows. (Claude Monet)
The seeing is instant. The recognition can be instant but it will take some time to stabilize the mind into the heart completely. (Mooji)
More or less, we're all afflicted with the psychology of the voyeur. Not in a strictly clinical or criminal sense, but in our whole physical and emotional stance before the world. (Jim Morrison)
I see first lots of things which dance - then everything becomes gradually connected. (Jim Morrison)
On the face of it, the easiest of all activities should be seeing what we see. In reality, it's the hardest. (Charles Movalli)
I do not paint what I see, but what I saw. (Edvard Munch)
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. (Edward R. Murrow)
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. (Anais Nin)
Nobody sees a flower – really – it is so small it takes time – we haven't time – and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. (Georgia O'Keeffe)
Capturing the way I see a subject is more important than capturing the image of the subject. (David Oleski)
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. (George Orwell)
Everything you see is a reflection of itself. You move around and you are a reflection of what is next to you. (Grace Paleg)
I see things going on before my eyes and I photograph them as they are, without trying to change them. I don't warn people beforehand. That's why I'm a chronicler. I speak about us and I speak about myself. (Martin Parr)
Seeing, in the finest and broadest sense, means using your senses, your intellect, and your emotions. It means encountering your subject matter with your whole being. It means looking beyond the labels of things and discovering the remarkable world around you. (Freeman Patterson)
For I am the size of what I see / not my height's size. (Fernando Pessoa)
If I see three oranges, I have to juggle. And if I see two towers, I have to walk. (Philippe Petit)
I see for others... in order to put on canvas the sudden apparitions which come to me. (Pablo Picasso)
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes. (Pablo Picasso)
In art, trust only two things. Your eye and... your other eye. (Tom Pirozzoli)
It's better not to see than to see wrongly. (Robert M. Pirsig)
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing. (Camille Pissarro)
The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man's own eyes when they look upon his own person. (Alexander Pope)
We see things but we don't see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another. (Marcel Proust)
Out of sight, out of mind. (Latin proverb)
The eye looks but it is the mind that sees. (Latin proverb)
When you do art, you see beyond the object. That effort of seeing beyond the object is also present in human relations. You see beyond the individual into what he/she thinks and feels... The relation is peculiar, meaning I don't thoroughly understand my relationship with the human being. But I do thoroughly understand the function of a radiator in a car. (Noah Purifoy)
Open your eyes. Look up to the skies and see. (Rock Group Queen)
The visual world has its own built-in aesthetics. Everything is visually in balance and harmony and in place. To see it takes time and a separation from our preconceptions of order and beauty. (Tiit Raid)
I could only relax when there was just one tiny white last spot left. I could see more clearly. I could grasp the shape of the picture again... The pictures are alive because of the white remnant, the almost concealment. (Arnulf Rainer)
One can see that a canvas is six feet by eight feet, say, quite accurately. But you can spend two minutes and think it's five, or thirty seconds and it's just a different bed for activities there. (Robert Rauschenberg)
When I look at my subject, if I squint and lose an edge, I lose it in the painting immediately. I also lose the edges in the shadows or those that are receding. I keep the harder edges, those in the light. You want a half-and-half rule, where half of the boundaries are lost and half are found. But all of these are done carefully and with great thought. (Charles Reid)
Don't overlook the obvious. (Verna Reid)
As soon as you see what you're looking at you have a name for it. You don't see it. The whole process of your thinking is not to see. You overcome sight by thinking... (Milton Resnick)
A mediocre man copying nature will never produce a work of art, because he really looks without seeing, and though he may have noted each detail minutely, the result will be flat and without character... the artist on the contrary, sees; that is to say, his eye, grafted on his heart, reads deeply into the bosom of nature. (Auguste Rodin)
In a dark time, the mind begins to see. (Theodore Roethke)
Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I but when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by. (Christina Rossetti)
It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way – not his way. (Mark Rothko)
Cognitive scientists would support the view that our visual system does not directly represent what is out there in the world and that our brain constructs a lot of the imagery that we believe we are seeing. (Galen Rowell)
Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more - more unseen forms become manifest to him. (Rumi)
- The Ground Beneath Her Feet...
The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame. (Salman Rushdie)
To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one. (John Ruskin)
You do not see with the lens of the eye. You seen through that, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye. (John Ruskin)
Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them. (John Ruskin)
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone sees the invisible. (Richard of Saint-Victor)
Look... don't see! (Paul Sandip)
If there is a conflict in your mind between what you know and what you are seeing, paint what you see because if you don't, the result will look like something that isn't there. (Richard Schmid)
Eighty percent of the information we receive comes through our eyes. And if you compare light energy to musical scales, it would only be one octave that the naked eye can see, which is right in the middle. (Louis Schwartzberg)
In the same way that visually impaired people fill in the missing sections of unperceived lines, so many painters need to disassociate from their work to 'see' it with a fresh eye. (Jo Scott-B)
They were lovely, your eyes, but you didn't know where to look. (George Seferis)
The eye must be easy, before it can be pleased. (William Shenstone)
The thing known and the thing seen are not the same. (Harriet Shorr)
Forget all the labels and just look. (Tom Shropshire)
We do not see everything in the environment in the complete, totally resolved, explicit character of the photograph. We, in fact, prioritize our seeing. (Burton Silverman)
Artists must literally go into a zone of intense seeing so the subjective and objective almost fuse together. (Burton Silverman)
Same old eyes, same old world but the difference is how you look at what is in front of you, not what it is. (Lister Sinclair)
- art critic...
I learn from everything I look at, good, bad or indifferent. I follow my eye reflexively; if it is drawn toward something, I pay attention and try to find out why. You train your eye, build up a mental image bank, and constantly try to pinpoint why some things are convincing and others aren't. (Roberta Smith)
Study your subject through half-closed eyes before starting to draw – you'll find that the lights and darks are exaggerated and easier to identify. (Stan Smith)
I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether. (Socrates)
One day, while Renoir was being fitted for new eyeglasses, he threw them to the floor, crying, 'Good God, I see like Bouguereau!' (Paul Soderberg)
Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things. (Edward Steichen)
I like a view, but I like to sit with my back turned to it. (Gertrude Stein)
I look at the bird in the cage and see the air, not only the air that is around the bird when it flies, but I see and feel the formative tendency of air in its form. When I do all this, then what lives in the forms becomes enlivened and spiritualized for me. (Rudolf Steiner)
What you see is what you see. (Frank Stella)
The mind stands in the way of the eye. (Arthur Stern)
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. (Wallace Stevens)
Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark. (Wallace Stevens)
I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing. (Alfred Stieglitz)
Paint what you see and look with your own eyes. (Gilbert Stuart)
The way we see is critical to understanding how others will read our compositions. (Mike Svob)
The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing. (Publilius Syrus)
Sometimes the heart sees what's invisible to the eye. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. (Henry David Thoreau)
The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. (Henry David Thoreau)
I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. (Henry David Thoreau)
- excerpt of his explanation as to why his painted ships had no portholes...
My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there. (J. M. W. Turner)
You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. (Mark Twain)
The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind couldn't detect. (Mark Twain)
It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter. (John Updike)
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees. (Paul Valery)
What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will. (Paul Valery)
The eye encompasses the beauty of the whole world. (Leonardo da Vinci)
The soul is content to stay imprisoned in the human body... for through the eyes all the various things of nature are represented to the soul. (Leonardo da Vinci)
The instant the atmosphere is illuminated it will be filled with an infinite number of images which are produced by the various bodies and colours assembled in it. And the eye is the target, a lodestone, of these images. (Leonardo da Vinci)
What is seen by the eye is transformed and colored by the vision of the mind. (Robert Wade)
You must understand that seeing is believing, but also know that believing is seeing. (Denis Waitley)
You see it the way you see it. Nobody can see it for someone else. (Annette Waterbeek)
-Pictures on a page...
My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive. (Edward Weston)
A student of James McNeill Whistler tells the great artist, 'I tend to paint what I see.' Whistler replies, 'Ah! The shock will come when you see what you paint!' (James Abbott McNeill Whistler)
The most fundamental reason one paints is in order to see. (Brett Whiteley)
To look at a thing is very different from seeing it. (Oscar Wilde)
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. (Oscar Wilde)
I have consecrated my life to changing matter into spirit with the hope of one day seeing it all. Seeing in its total form, while wearing the mask, from the distance of death. And there, in the eternal destiny, to seek the face I had before the world was made. (Joel Peter Witkin)
Not 'Seeing is Believing' you ninny, but 'Believing is Seeing.' For modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text. (Tom Wolfe)
The things which I have seen I now can see no more. (William Wordsworth)
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