Distance Perception Quotes

I was stuck in traffic and I looked in the mirror and in the car behind me there was a couple having a horrible argument and right below their image it said "Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear". I just thought, man I hope so because she was pretty mad.

There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.

It's pretty far, but it doesn't seem like it.

Telescopes and binoculars endanger the ever-distant sublime.

Mountains appear more lofty the nearer they are approached, but great men resemble them not in this particular.

It's not too far; it just seems like it is.

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.

The same image that I have of all the countries where I am supposed to go: it's far, it's different, it will be necessarily complicated ... It's another part of the world for me coming [from] the United States.

Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do

Space is about 100 kilometers away. That’s far away—I wouldn’t want to climb a ladder to get there—but it isn’t that far away. If you’re in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.

With the most powerful binoculars, I cannot see Alaska.

In an atmosphere of uniform density the most distant things seen through it, such as the mountains, in consequence of the great quantity of atmosphere which is between your eye and them, will appear blue. Therefore you should make the building... wall which is more distant less defined and bluer... five times as far away, make five times as blue.

"I see nobody on the road," said Alice. "I only wish I had such eyes," the King remarked in a fretful tone. "To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light."

Things seem more when you’re little. They seem bigger, and distances seem farther.

I remembered watching the film from Alfred Hitchcock, 'Dial M for Murder,' and he shot almost all of that movie in one room. There was a genius in what Hitchcock did by manipulating things in that room so that you could see the distances between things like the tables and the vases because of how he used perspective.

Beauty, my dear Sir, is not so much a quality of the object beheld, as an effect in him who beholds it. If our sight were longer or shorter, or if our constitution were different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen, and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through the microscope will appear horrible. Some things are beautiful at a distance, but ugly near;

...for some of us, one mile can be more to walk than thirty.

You can measure distance by time. 'How far away is it?' 'Oh about 20 minutes.' But it doesn't work the other way. 'When do you get off work?' 'Around 3 miles.'

Of several bodies, all equally large and equally distant, that which is most brightly illuminated will appear to the eye nearest and largest.

I don't know how many of you have been to New York, but if a building is two blocks away from anything, you can't see it.

Your country becomes funnier the further you are from it. I remember seeing Boris Johnson on the news when I was in Hong Kong, and he looked so much more ridiculous.

To any who know the star field well from one certain reference point, stars are as individual as people. Jump ten parsecs, however, and not even your own sun is recognizable.

A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.

But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.