#amiquotes

Elliot Erwitt, New York City, 1950

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"The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is, but that you can see the world as it isn’t. We can remember the past and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it’s like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this differently."

Night at Sea - Daniel Ablitt , 2024 :: British , b. 1976 - :: [Oil on panel , 25 x 32 cm.]

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“The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an eye for resemblance.”

— Aristotle, De Poetica, 322 B.C. (via amiquote)

Egon Schiele

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“In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.” ”

 The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor — not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition. 

The big choir, 2006 - by Yves Lecoq (1946), French

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“We are all a complete mixture; yet at the same time, we are all related. Each gene can trace its own journey to a different common ancestor. This is a quite extraordinary legacy that we all have inherited from the people who lived before us. Our genes did not just appear when we were born. They have been carried to us by millions of individual lives over thousands of generations.” Bryan Sykes, a former Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford and a current Fellow of Wolfson College, The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry, 2001 (via amiquote)