Thomas Hardy - Mark Twain - William Shakespeare - Edgar Degas - Apples Pears & Paint: How to Make a Still Life Painting TV - Jasper Johns - The Soloist 2009 - Horizon TV - Beau Lotto - Star Trek TV - Robert S McNamara TV - Proverbs - Penn & Teller TV - John Ruskin - David Hockney - Rene Magritte - Mae West - Beau Lotto - Luke 10:23 - John 1:18 - John 9:25 - I John 4:12 - Arthur Conan Dolye - Andy Warhol - Samuel Johnson - Lionel Tiger - Stuart Pearce - Trailer Park Boys 2001-2018 - Plato -
Queer are the ways of a man I know:
He comes and stands
In a careworn craze,
And looks at the sands
And the seaward haze
With moveless hands
And face and gaze,
Then turns to go ...
And what does he see when he gazes so? ... Thomas Hardy, The Phantom Horsewoman
Stars and shadows ain’t good to see by. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
O! woe is me,
To have seen what I have seen, and see what I see! William Shakespeare, Hamlet III i 169
Hamlet: Do you see nothing there?
Queen: Nothing at all; yet all there is I see. ibid. III iv 135
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. Edgar Degas
The story of still life is not about looking, it’s about seeing. Still-life asks us to stop and consider the world anew. Apples, Pears and Paint: How to Make a Still Life Painting, BBC 2014
My work is largely concerned with relations between seeing and knowing, seeing and saying, seeing and believing. Jasper Johns
If I ever see you again, I’ll cut you like a fish. The Soloist 2009 starring Jamie Foxx & Robert Downey junior & Catherine Keener & Tom Hollander & Lisa Gay Hamilton & Nelsan Ellis & Rachael Harris & Stephen Root & Lorraine Toussaint & Justin Martin & Octavia Spencer & Jena Malone & Lemon Anderson et al, director Joe Wright, Foxx to Downey
Some programmes aren’t much fun in black and white. Colour makes the world a much more enjoyable place. But why do we see in colour? Surely not for simple aesthetic reasons. Colour vision may have evolved because it serves some practical purpose. This evolutionary process is reflected in a quite remarkable new set of ideas that completely overturn our old theories of how we see colours. Horizon: Colourful Notions, BBC 1985
But the theory still can’t explain these coloured shadows: how green light produces a red shadow or blue light produces a yellow one. ibid.
Dr Edwin Land astonished the world with the Polaroid instant camera in 1948. ibid.
There must indeed be some relation between the colour of an object and the amount of long, middle or short-wave light it reflects. ibid.
Welcome to the strange and wonderful world of illusions. Illusions to deceive your eyes, trick your tongue and fool your sense of touch ... These illusions hold the key to how our senses work. Horizon: Is Seeing Believing? BBC 2010
Synaesthesia is a mixing of the senses. A sensory experience in one sense can trigger an entirely different reaction in another. ibid.
We live a world made of a kaleidoscope of colours ... Are these colours really what they seem? Is the sky really blue? Are the leaves really green? Horizon: Do You See What I See? BBC 2011
It’s an unsettling idea that colours may not really exist ... Do you see red in the same way that I do? ibid.
Wearing red seemed to help people win in a sporting situation. ibid.
Colour can speed up time. But it’s not the colour red that does it ... Blue seems to be able to speed up time. ibid.
For us as a species the way we see colour has a history. ibid.
Red and green are colours we have had to learn. ibid.
Colour is created in your brain. It’s made from the language you speak, the memories you carry, even the moods you feel. It is one of Nature’s great illusions. ibid.
There’s even a difference between men and women. ibid.
We are seeing things that cannot possibly exist yet they seem real. Star Trek s1e15: Shore Leave, Kirk
Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong. Robert S McNamara, The Fog of War, 2003
Seeing is believing. Early 17th century proverb
People see what their personality is predisposed to see. Penn & Teller, Bullshit! s3e12: Signs from Heaven, Showtime 2005
You see what you want to see. ibid.
The more I think of it, I find this conclusion more impressed upon me – that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. John Ruskin
New ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling. David Hockney, televised interview cited Hockney, BBC 2015
Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present. Rene Magritte
Why don’t you come up sometime, and see me? Mae West, She Done Him Wrong, film 1933
So colour is effectively an illusion. It’s an illusion that helps us see the world in the way that’s useful to see. Dr Beau Lotto, University College London
Blessed are the eyes which see the things which ye see. Luke 10:23
No man hath seen God at any time. John 1:18
One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see. John 9:25
No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. I John 4:12
You see, but you do not observe. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892
I always think about what it means to wear eyeglasses. When you get used to glasses you don’t know how far you could really see. I think about all the people before eyeglasses were invented. It must have been weird because everyone was seeing in different ways according to how bad their eyes were. Now, eyeglasses standardize everyone’s vision to 20-20. That’s an example of everyone becoming more alike. Everyone could be seeing at different levels if it weren’t for glasses. Andy Warhol
Worth seeing, but not worth going to see. Samuel Johnson, re Giant’s Causeway
There is a tendency for humans consciously to see what they wish to see. They literally have difficulty seeing things with negative connotations while seeing with increasing ease items that are positive. Lionel Tiger, Optimism: The Biology of Hope
I can see the carrot at the end of the tunnel. Stuart Pearce, 1992
Thanks for helping me see things more clearly. You’re really good at that. Trailer Park Boys s12e2: Godspeed My Muscular Friend, Ricky to Bubbles
Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let along believed, by the masses. Plato