Visual Quotes

The stars up close to the moon were pale they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon

~ Ken Kesey

You know what I'm sick of? Using my brain. All day long it's people and words and stress and meetings and books that you don't remember you're not really into until you open them on the train home and compromise and sometimes I just want to look at a picture of a dress. Followed by a picture of some cupcakes. And then a kitten.

~ Robyn Wilder

I have not done enough for effect. Horace Greeley

~ Harold Holzer

His chief form of entertainment was reading. The last moments he was in a cabin were usually spent scanning bookshelves and nightstands. The life inside a book always felt welcoming to Knight. It pressed no demands on him, while the world of actual human interactions was so complex. Conversations between people can move like tennis games, swift and unpredictable. There are constant subtle visual and verbal cues, there's innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone. Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. It's part of being human.To Knight, it all felt impossible. His engagement with the written word might have been the closest he could come to genuine human encounters. The stretch of days between thieving raids allowed him to tumble into the pages, and if he felt transported he could float in bookworld, undisturbed, for as long as he pleased.

~ Michael Finkel

Wrinkles ? Why all the fuss ? Think of them as lines of distinction, marks of maturity.

~ Alex Morritt

On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.

~ John Updike

Emotion is ‘recognition’. When treasured moments are identified in the jungle of our personal history during a visual or aural encounter, we capture magic sparks from our past, arousing flashes of insight and revealing an inner flare. These instants of recognition may kindle enthralling emotion and fulfilling inspiration. (“Those journeys of love”)

~ Erik Pevernagie

I can see better when i close my eyes; don't make much ado, that's my latest style of view.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

I am a lifelong lover of form–content interplay, and this book is no exception. As with several of my previous books, I have had the chance to typeset it down to the finest level of detail, and my quest for visual elegance on each page has had countless repercussions on how I phrase my ideas. To some this may sound like the tail wagging the dog, but I think that attention to form improves anyone’s writing. I hope that reading this book not only is stimulating intellectually but also is a pleasant visual experience.

~ Douglas R. Hofstadter

Never forget that all these people are primarily a visual people. They are designers, window dressers, models, photographers, graphic artists. They design the windows at Saks. Do you understand? They are a visual people, and they value the eye, and their sins, as Saint Augustine said, are the sins of the eye. And being people who live on the surface of the eye, they cannot be expected to have minds or hearts. It sounds absurd but it’s that simple. Everything is beautiful here, and that is all it is: beautiful. Do not expect anything else, do not expect nourishment for anything but your eye—and you will handle it all beautifully. You will know exactly what you are dealing with.

~ Andrew Holleran

[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the simple rather than the ornate. The reason owes nothing to climate or genetics, added Keene, but is the result of the actions of writers, painters and theorists, who had actively shaped the sense of beauty of their nation.Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. 'Culture' is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to.

~ Alain De Botton

Your expectations of other people should never be greater than what you expect of God. Why is it that you can patiently wait for him to make your life better, but you won't consider he is patiently waiting for you to be better?

~ Shannon L. Alder

An experiment had students rate lecturing professors with the sound off. Their ratings closely mirrored evaluations of students who went through the courses with the same professors.

~ David Urso

We know that children with autism like order, that they are often very visual and that they can be quite literal. They deserve beautiful resources and symbols that make sense. If a picture does not explain visually, it is pointless and the child will stop looking to the pictures for information.

~ Adele Devine

Stand-up comics reflect less of a visual humor and more of a commentary.

~ Shel Silverstein

Communication is the key, and it's one thing I had to learn-to talk to the actors. I was so involved with the visual and technical aspects that I would forget about the actors.

~ Steve Buscemi

Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.

~ Umberto Eco

The late 20th century had just enough communication abilities to allow superstar-ness and communality to happen. It was a musical renaissance that rivals the visual one that happened in the 1400s.

~ Daryl Hall

For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.

~ Bridget Riley

I've been designing since I was 8. I started sketching dresses I could wear when skating. I was always involved in all aspects of skating, not just the technique, the choreography, the music, but the visual aspects, too - what I should wear.

~ Vera Wang

I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.

~ J. Carter Brown

Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.

~ Julia Morgan

The visual architecture of 'Biutiful' is the most sophisticated of all the films I have directed.

~ Alejandro González Iñárritu

After about the first Millennium, Italy was the cradle of Romanesque architecture, which spread throughout Europe, much of it extending the structural daring with minimal visual elaboration.

~ Harry Seidler

When I was a little kid, I wanted to be, like, you know, a movie star, you know? Or, I always have interest in movie, you know? Because I like the visual aspect of the movies, et cetera.

~ Tommy Wiseau

Design must be functional, and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.

~ Ferdinand Porsche

We make such terrible mistakes with visual choices about beauty.

~ Marina Abramović

Be drawn to the visual arts for it can expand your imagination.

~ Barbara Januszkiewicz

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

~ Eugenio Montale

Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.

~ Billy Collins

There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal.

~ Steven Pinker