Benjamin Franklin Quotes

Different people, in good faith, can look at the same fact and interpret it differently. But that's where an interesting conversation begins.

All good art, to me, is uncertainty.

Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.

If you convinced me And I convinced you, Would there not still be Two points of view?

Watt's concern, deep as it appeared, was not after all what the figure was, in reality, but with what the figure appeared to be, in reality.

The cards always look different when it's your turn to play them; loaded with subtly different possibilities.

My films are misinterpreted all the time. I don't mind that. Everybody's films are misinterpreted. But there's no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them.

In a word, to perceive an object abstractly means not to perceive some aspects of it. It clearly implies selection of some attributes, rejection of other attributes, creation or distortion of still others. We make of it what we wish. We create it.

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

A letter is a risky thing; the writer gambles on the reader's frame of mind.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn't make it true.

Our actions are like blank rhymes, to which everyone applies what sense he pleases.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.

Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?

What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.

Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.

The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.

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.

Ask two people to tell you anything, you’ll get two versions. Even easy things like directions, let alone important or semi-controversial topics like why a fight started or what a person was generally like. If you don’t know something for yourself, you just can’t be sure.

All our knowledge originates in opinion.

but even the facts do not always tell the truth