A Quote by Samuel Johnson

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

Samuel Johnson

Quote Topics

Distance Effect Eye Mind Same

Quote Author

Samuel Johnson
English - Writer
September 18, 1709 - December 13, 1784

I have only one thing to say to the melancholy man: 'Look into the distance.' ... When you look at the stars or the ocean's expanse, your eye is completely relaxed; once your eye is relaxed, your mind is unfettered.

Emile Chartier

Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite public agents to corruption, plunder and waste.

Thomas Jefferson

The mind, in discovering truths, acts in the same manner as it acts through the eye in discovering objects; when once any object has been seen, it is impossible to put the mind back to the same condition it was in before it saw it.

Thomas Paine

This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.

Mario Vargas Llosa

The loveliest face in all the world will not please you if you see it suddenly eye to eye, at a distance of half an inch from your own.

Max Beerbohm

The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.

Aldous Huxley

If you are writing something, you automatically create a certain distance. It can be very little. Even within the same city you imaginatively have a certain distance from your subject, and at the same time, you have to have a connection.

Romesh Gunesekera

All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.

Henry David Thoreau

It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

Bridget Riley

Perception is a clash of mind and eye, the eye believing what it sees, the mind seeing what it believes.

Robert Breault

Embracing cultural distance, cultural distance nationalism, means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites than non-whites.

Amy Wax

Volumes are now written and spoken upon the effect of the mind upon the body. Much of it is true. But I wish a little more was thought of the effect of the body on the mind.

Florence Nightingale

We may produce at will, from a sending station. an electrical effect in any particular region of the globe; we may determine the relative position or course of a moving object, such as a vessel at sea, the distance traversed by the same, or its speed.

Nikola Tesla

Because everyone is the same distance from the sun. Does it really lessen the distance if you live on top of a skyscraper?

Anthony de Mello

The great and secret message of the experiential mystics the world over is that, with the eye of contemplation, Spirit can be seen. With the eye of contemplation, the great Within radiantly unfolds. And in all cases, the eye with which you see God is the same eye with which God sees you: the eye of contemplation.