Quotes about vision

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.

— Jean Baudrillard

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.

— Jean Baudrillard

Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.

— John Berger

TV is a fickle business. I'm only good for the length of my contract.

— Tom Brokaw

So by all means let's have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn't it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.

— Raymond Chandler

Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.

— Raymond Chandler

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdad's of his dreams to rise from the dust.

— Salvador Dali

Television thrives on unreason, and unreason thrives on television. It strikes at the emotions rather than the intellect.

— Sir Robin Day

So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

— T. S. Eliot

Let's face it, there are no plain women on television.

— Anna Ford

I got sick of turning on the TV and seeing my face.

— Michael J. Fox

Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your Living room by people you wouldn't have in your house.

— David Frost

Television is an excellent system when one has nothing to lose, as is the case with a nomadic and rootless country like the United States, but in Europe the affect of television is that of a bulldozer which reduces culture to the lowest possible denominator.

— Marc Fumaroli

A three -- to four -- to five-hour experience with nothingness.

— Frederic Glezer

There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Television has brought back murder into the home -- where it belongs.

— Alfred Hitchcock

Television is becoming a collage -- there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different.

— David Hockney

We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.

— Robert M. Hutchins

Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.

— Clive James

Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn't go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they're so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot's wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful -- our own innocence.

— Pauline Kael

Television, despite its enormous presence, turns out to have added pitifully few lines to the communal memory.

— Justin Kaplan

Television -- a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done.

— Kovacs

Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you that what he feels like doing, you won't feel like watching.

— Fran Lebowitz

The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.

— Norman Mailer

I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.

— Groucho Marx

I made a pact with myself a long time ago: Never watch anything stupider than you. It's helped me a lot. I made a pact with myself a long time ago: Never watch anything stupider than you. It's helped me a lot.

— Bette Midler

In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.

— Arthur Miller

Television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity.

— Malcolm Muggeridge

Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.

— Rupert Murdoch

The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?

— Joyce Carol Oates

Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.

— Conor Cruise O'Brien

Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.

— Camille Paglia

Already we Viewers, when not viewing, have begun to whisper to one another that the more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

— J. B. Priestley

The great networks are there to prove that ideas can be canned like spaghetti. If everything ends up by tasting like everything else, is that not the evidence that it has been properly cooked?

— Frederic Raphael

Performing doesn't turn me on. It's an egomaniac business, filled with prima donnas -- including this one.

— Dan Rather

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.

— Andrew Ross

Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.

— Nathalie Sarraute

People assume you can't be shy and be on television. They're wrong.

— Diane Sawyer

The answers to life's problems aren't at the bottom of a bottle, they're on TV!

— Homer Simpson

If we had had the right technology back then, you would have seen Eva Braun on the Donahue show and Adolf Hitler on Meet the Press.

— Ed Turner

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

— Orson Welles

The most puzzling thing about TV is the steady advance of the sponsor across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler.

— Elwyn Brooks White

Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing.

— Elwyn Brooks White

TV -- chewing gum for the eyes.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

What do a few lies on TV matter? They can be swallowed, digested and excreted, or follow people when they doze off to sink into oblivion.

— Zhang Jie

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.

— Louisa May Alcott

Why should you be content with so little? Why shouldn't you reach out for something big?

— Charles L. Allen

No vision and you perish; No Ideal, and you're lost; Your heart must ever cherish Some faith at any cost. Some hope, some dream to cling to, Some rainbow in the sky, Some melody to sing to, Some service that is high.

— Harriet Du Autermont

The ultimate function of prophecy is not to tell the future, but to make it. Your successful past will block your visions of the future.

— Joel A. Barker

Your successful past will block your visions of the future.

— Joel A. Barker

Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.

— Joel A. Barker

Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.

— Jean Baudrillard

Where there is no vision, the people perish. [Proverbs 29:18]

— Bible

As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.

— William Blake

When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.

— William Blake

We need to learn to set our course by the stars, not by the lights of every passing ship.

— Omar Nelson Bradley

Envisioning the end is enough to put the means in motion.

— Dorothea Brande

You have to think big to be big.

— Claude M. Bristol

The only limits are, as always, those of vision.

— James Broughton

It takes someone with a vision of the possibilities to attain new levels of experience. Someone with the courage to live his dreams.

— Les Brown

You don't need an explanation for everything, Recognize that there are such things as miracles -- events for which there are no ready explanations. Later knowledge may explain those events quite easily.

— Harry Browne

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work. Remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.

— Daniel H. Burnham

The road winds up the hill to meet the height; Beyond the locust hedge it curves from sight -- And yet no man would foolishly contend. That where he sees it not, it makes an end.

— Emma Carleton

No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses.

— Thomas Carlyle

I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.

— Thomas Carlyle

Aim for the highest.

— Andrew Carnegie

Objects close to the eye shut out much larger objects on the horizon; and splendors born only of the earth eclipse the stars. So it is with people who sometimes cover up the entire disc of eternity with a dollar, and so quench transcendent glories with a little shining dust.

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The world values the seer above all men, and has always done so. Nay, it values all men in proportion as they partake of the character of seers. The Elgin Marbles and a decision of John Marshall are valued for the same reason. What we feel in them is a painstaking submission to facts beyond the author's control, and to ideas imposed upon him by his vision. So with Beethoven's Symphonies, with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations -- with any conceivable output of the human mind of which you approve. You love them because you say, These things were not made, they were seen.

— John Jay Chapman

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

— Winston Churchill

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

— Arthur C. Clarke

Vision -- It reaches beyond the thing that is, into the conception of what can be. Imagination gives you the picture. Vision gives you the impulse to make the picture your own.

— Robert Collier

Faith is the confidence, the assurance, the enforcing truth, the knowing...

— Robert Collier

We do not need more intellectual power, we need more spiritual power. We do not need more of the things that are seen, we need more of the things that are unseen.

— Calvin Coolidge

It's easy to say no! when there's a deeper yes! burning inside.

— Stephen R. Covey

Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.

— Robertson Davies

What every man needs, regardless of his job or the kind of work he is doing, is a vision of what his place is and may be. He needs an objective and a purpose. He needs a feeling and a belief that he has some worthwhile thing to do. What this is no one can tell him. It must be his own creation. Its success will be measured by the nature of his vision, what he has done to equip himself, and how well he has performed along the line of its development.

— Joseph M. Dodge

Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I always looked ahead.

— Chris Evert

The best vision is insight.

— Malcolm S. Forbes

Only he who can see the invisible can do the impossible.

— Frank Gaines

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.

— Mahatma Gandhi

You have to see the pattern, understand the order and experience the vision.

— Michael E. Gerber

We need to give ourselves permission to act out our dreams and visions, not look for more sensations, more phenomena, but live our strongest dreams -- even if it takes a lifetime.

— Vijali Hamilton

It is never safe to look into the future with eyes of fear.

— Edward H. Harriman

Cherish you visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul; the blue prints of your ultimate achievements.

— Napoleon Hill

The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.

— Aldous Huxley

So shine on through these days we have to fill.

— Elton John

I am going to build the kind of nation that President Roosevelt hoped for, President Truman worked for, and President Kennedy died for.

— Lyndon B. Johnson

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.

— Carl Jung

Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.

— Casey Kasem

Makers of empire, they have fought for bigger things than crowns and higher seats than thrones.

— Herbert Kaufman

It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.

— Helen Keller

The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring this endeavor will light our bounty and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

— John F. Kennedy

I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

One eye sees, the other feels.

— Paul Klee

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it; Every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The kingdom of God could be realized simply by daring to live differently from the normal conventions. The kingdom of God in the teachings of Jesus was not an apocalyptic or heavenly projection of otherworldly desire. It was driven by a desire to think that there must be a better way to live together than the present state of affairs. And it called for a change of behavior in the present on the part of individuals invested in the vision.

— Burton L. Mack