The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in its end, it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a convention of cartographers.

We are compelled to feel that the world presented to our senses is not the world as it really is, but only the world as it appears to beings constituted as we are. The thing in itself remains forever unknowable.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it in the same stone, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.

We arrive at truth, not by the reason alone, but by the whole man. Genius is the recovery of childhood at will—the power to live, think, and act in childhood again; so all great poets are necessarily children, in the sense that they retain the power of wonder and the capacity to see the world as if for the first time.

The mind does not work by way of ideas, but by way of passionate preferences; we do not see nature, we see our idea of nature.

The mind is a collection of surfaces, and we must learn to read the signs written upon them—to distinguish between the scratches of accident and the marks of intention.

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.

We do not remember days, we remember moments. The gods, not being human, have mercifully forgotten the days and the years, the stretch of foul weather and the long dull reaches of our lives, and have retained only the bright moments: thus our lives are high-lighted and dramatic with the deus ex machina and the tragedy of unforeseen events.

The eye is not merely a physical organ, but the supreme instrument of the mind; it is the only sense that can perceive beauty, and beauty is the only thing that makes life worth living.

We do not remember days, we remember moments. The gods, not being human, have pleasantly forgotten the days and the years of the universe and have kept only a few moments of beauty wherewith to refresh themselves.

The human mind is like a flashlight in the dark. It illuminates a small circle of the world around us, but beyond that circle lies an infinite darkness that we can never fully penetrate.

To know the world one must construct it. One does not go for a walk in order to walk but to construct the world at each step.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and to avoid others, to make much of some impressions, little of others. It is thus a subjective instrument, and bears the stamp of subjectivity upon all it apprehends.

The mind has shown itself capable of grasping the incomprehensible; it has stood in the presence of the infinite and perceived it as finite; it has measured the unmeasurable and found dimensions.

The eye is not merely a physical organ, but the supreme instrument of touch, and we see only with our eyes open to the world; blindness is not the absence of sight but the refusal to look.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and ignore the rest. The immediate fact which the science of logic has to take account of is that certain material is presented, certain aspects of this material are noted and emphasized.

The true paradox of consciousness is that we become most fully conscious precisely when we lose the sense of being conscious at all, when the instrument becomes so perfectly attuned to its object that subject and object merge into one continuous act of perception.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are indifferent to others, remaining by nature blind to facts that are uncongenial to them.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are on the alert for them, and especially apt to be lively and to produce the感 of reality whenever they are stimulated.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are negative to others, making us accept or reject much that we might theoretically be indifferent to.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol. I naturally dress my thoughts in pictures.

The true paradox of consciousness is that the more narrowly we examine it, the more it seems to elude us, as if consciousness were not an object to be grasped but a field in which the grasping occurs.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and ignore others, leaving us to perceive only a biased sectional view of the world.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are anxious until they find them. If the mind were a mere mirror, it might be pleasant for it to reflect the world, but it would have no motive to seek one kind of world rather than another.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and which ignore the rest, and this selectiveness is as characteristic of man as of the lower animals. A thing is important if it has consequences, if it is connected with our emotional and practical interests; otherwise it is trivial and unworthy of notice.

The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are apt to feel snubbed or startled by others. The truth is that there are as many 'kinds' of things in the world as there are kinds of interest among observers of it.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and tend to ignore the rest, and all the phenomena thus ignored are as if non-existent for the mind. The consequence is that the mind, by the mere fact of attending to a limited set of phenomena, creates, in a sense, a limited world.

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In Search of Banksy

It is one of the most popular names in Britain, so common it helps him hide in plain sight.

The mind is in its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

The terror of the unfamiliar is the root of all superstition; yet the familiar itself is but the accumulated strangeness of yesterday.

We live on the surface of things. The only depth we know is the depth of our own ignorance when we mistake appearance for reality.