J. L. Austin Quotes

The light is there, and colors surround us. However, if there were no light nor colors in our own eye, we wouldn't perceive such things outside of us.

Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world.

Sense data are much more controversial than qualia, because they are associated with a controversial theory of perception - that one perceives the world by perceiving one's sense-data, or something like that.

We are astonished at thought, but sensation is equally wonderful.

Doth the Reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?

Language, as symbol, determines much of the nature and quality of our experience.

Philosophers say that nothing can be seen that is neither illuminated nor colored.

Being that can be understood is language.

If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire.

The mobility of the eye is such a fundamental treasure that we have, and that coexists with sensation. On the dance floor, you are totally in reality, while also experiencing this dream imagery of changing colors and wet surfaces of skin. Sometimes it's the shadow outline in the strobe light, and in another moment it's the closeup of an armpit that you're looking into. I'm not photographing all the time, but it's something that I actually see all the time, and not just on the dance floor.

How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).

The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

"Is," "is," "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

Rationalism is the idea that we can ever understand anything about the state of being. It's a deathtrip. It always has been. . . . And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then irrationalism might very well be a lifetrip . . . at least until it proves otherwise.

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

Every man feels that perception gives him an invincible belief of the existence of that which he perceives; and that this belief is not the effect of reasoning, but the immediate consequence of perception. When philosophers have wearied themselves and their readers with their speculations upon this subject, they can neither strengthen this belief, nor weaken it; nor can they shew how it is produced. It puts the philosopher and the peasant upon a level; and neither of them can give any other reason for believing his senses, than that he finds it impossible for him to do otherwise.

I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process.

External reality is sort of an affectation of the nervous system.

Time, space, and causality are only metaphors of knowledge, with which we explain things to ourselves.

There is no criterion by which to recognize what is a color, except that it is one of our colors.

Experience is always larger than language.

I love the world, because I love the mind that created the world.

The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.