A. R. Ammons Quotes

I guess my experience with some stuff is kind of abstract.

We never stop to consider that our beliefs are only a relative truth that's always going to be distorted by all the knowledge we have stored in our memory.

A man sees what he wants to see, And disregards the rest.

We don't live in the world of reality, we live in the world of how we perceive reality.

Our experience of many life circumstances is a function of our personal perspective and not the circumstance itself.

It's really interesting to me how all of us can experience the exact same event, and yet come away with wildly disparate interpretations of what happened. We each have totally different ideas of what was said, what was intended, and what really took place.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

Our great cultural error is to assume that 'truth' arrives only through reductive theories.

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.

I'm less interested in reality. I'm more interested in perception, the truth of the universe that we see.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Truth is, in fact, an elusive concept. It depends almost entirely on where you are standing at the time. It is a human instinct to confuse belief with truth.

The prism through which you experience life is so unique. There is no objective experience.

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed

The world is how we see the world. Some people see the world good, the other people see the world bad. Every person has an idea of the world with a subjective [viewpoint].

What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself

Your positions on EVERYTHING are based on the story you tell yourself and not some universal fact from the universal fact database.

I wouldn't claim to know what another person is thinking. I can imagine it, but it's my interpretation, and I try to make that clear. It's my vision of what I think their life is. I don't think there are empirical truths in that regard.

The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

Necessity is an interpretation, not a fact.

What you see is evidence of what you believe.

Who’s to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos.” The skin of this world,” he said quietly.

The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.