Perceptual Limits Quotes

You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

The first-beginnings of things cannot be distinguished by the eye.

The thought of a limit to perceptual space and time staggers the mind.

The world of sight is still limitless. It is the artist who limits vision to the cramped dimensions of his own ego.

The perception of the horizon is an earthbound event; all horizons disappear in space, and we are left shorn of the sweet roots that have held us to the earth, challenged to imagine what is truly present just before us, a unified and seemingly limitless universe.

The general laws of Nature are not, for the most part, immediate objects of perception.

The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded.

To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.

There's no way to remove the observer - us - from our perceptions of the world.

Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.

Those who know God know that it is quite a mistake to suppose that there are only five senses.

There are colors we can't see, but they're connected to the ones we can, There's a connection between everything.

An environment is precisely something one is unable to point to yet is strangely there nonetheless.

Visionaries are limited by their visions.

I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.

The new limitations are the human ones of perception.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.

No mortal eye has ever fully seen a flash of lightning ... for no matter how firmly we look, our eyes are sure to be dazzled.

We seek true individuality and the true individuals. But we find them not. For lo, we mortals see what our poor eyes can see; and they, the true individuals, - they belong not to this world of our merely human sense and thought.

We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.

But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun and woven for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial ME for dwelling here, and yet to blind it, lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavor to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through.

Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large; the mundane world of the familiar.

The time between appearances for us is so great that we lose track of it. It would be like watching 'Ben Hur' at one frame a second. There would be long periods of time where absolutely nothing was going on.