Thomas Merton Quotes

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Draw what you see.

Sometimes art imitates life.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.

If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.

We all know a mirror reflects us, if you look in it. If you move, the reflection moves. If you project from a mirror, meaning it will project an image, it's nothing to do with you. The world seen by nobody.

The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.

This is not a just image, this is just an image.

Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I'd have been lying!

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.

To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

A picture is a model of reality.

All the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs.

If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.

For example, you now look at pictures from 1968, they are hugely misleading in terms of standing in as an absolute image of the time. Because maybe two percent of the people looked the way that we now associate with that time. I was also aware that what I was aiming for is an idealized, utopian version of how people could be together. I found photography to be a very powerful tool because as long as it looks real, it is perceived as real.

Reality must be expressed by a physical symbol.