Ren Ng Quotes

Anyone who wants to look at sunlight naturally wipes his eye clear first, in order to make, at any rate, some approximation to the purity of that on which he looks; and a person wishing to see a city or country goes to the place in order to do so.

Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see.

Seeing is a gift that comes with practice.

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray.

I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.

The thing is that when you don't carry a camera, that's when you see pictures in particular, or at least that's when you think you see pictures in particular. When you do carry it, if you do see one on the occasion that you do, you can take it.

If you're really in the process of photographing, you are absolutely aware. You are looking.

I think the one lesson I have learned is that there is no substitute for paying attention.

When you're sent something and read it, either you can see it while you read it, or you can't.

As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.

Seeing is in itself a movement.

When the time comes for your brain to process the information, the second word comes up faster than the first one. So when it's in your head, all of a sudden, it comes out backwards and you think of the word backwards.

A lot of people can't remember things because they weren't actually there to begin with - they don't take it all in.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

Focusing isn't just an optical activity, it is also a mental one.

It's hard to watch something go on and be talking at the same time.

How are things visible? Can you see an egg against a white background? Not by drawing a line around it can you make it evident.

My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat - or in film's case 'run on' - manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing.

Men don't pay attention to small things.

To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about.

Light knows when you're looking at it.

I read slowly, I watch movies slowly, because I retain everything.

The lesson to learn is to pay attention for 90 minutes because in front of you are great champions.

A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!

Besides learning to see, there is another art to be learned - not to see what is not.