D. H. Lawrence Quotes

All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.

We can easily represent things as we wish them to be.

I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

Perception is real even when it is not reality.

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

The more real things get, the more like myths they become.

Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.

The world you perceive is a drastically simplified model of the real world.

The map is not the territory... The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map.

How can you see something that isn't there?" yawned the Humbug, who wasn't fully awake yet. "Sometimes, it's much simpler than seeing things that are,"he said. "For instance, if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones." "Then where is Reality?" barked Tock. "Right here,"cried Alec, waving his arms.

All descriptions of reality are limited expressions of the world of emptiness. Yet we attach to the descriptions and think they are reality. That is a mistake.

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

Illusions... are simple facts, but they have been created by the mind, by the spirit, and they are one of the justifications of the new spatial configuration.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

Everything that happens is at least one dimension smaller than you've imagined it to be.

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call “reality”. However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions?

Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.

Psychology is the description of the reflection of the terrestial world in the heavenly plane, or, more correctly, the description of a reflection such as we, soaked as we are in our terrestial nature, imagine it, for no reflection actually occurs, only we see earth wherever we turn.

As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

The thought is not the thing.

The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.

Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real.

Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?