Vanishing Point Quotes

• In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Television, Vanishing, Wraps

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel (1996). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Hardwired

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• Perspective is a law of optics... The Chinese did not have a system like it. Indeed, it is said they rejected the idea of the vanishing point in the eleventh century, because it meant the viewer was not there, indeed, had no movement, therefore was not alive.

  David Hockney

  Law, Ideas, Perspective

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• Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.

  Alan Dean Foster

  Freedom, Justice, Chaos

  Alan Dean Foster (2014). “To the Vanishing Point”, p.184, Open Road Media

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• Your eye level is your reference point for drawing the perspective lines. All lines above your eye level will go down to the horizon vanishing point and all lines below your eye level will go up to the horizon vanishing point.

  Robert A. Lovett

  Eye, Drawing, Perspective

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• Depth, in a pictorial, plastic sense, is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of the Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary (and in absolute denial of this doctrine) by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull . Nor is depth created by tonal gradation (another doctrine of the academician which, at its culmination, degraded the use of color to a mere function of expressing dark and light).

  Hans Hofmann

  Dark, Color, Light

  Lowery Stokes Sims, Hans Hofmann, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.) (1999). “Hans Hofmann in the Metropolitan Museum of Art”, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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• The vanishing point leads to the missiles of today, which can take us out of this world. It could be that the west's greatest mistakes were the 'invention' of the external vanishing point and the internal combustion engine.

  David Hockney

  Mistake, Perspective, World

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• Love and hate, black and white,
  Right or wrong, who is right?
  Some smoke joints to anoint their brain
  To the vanishing point...so they won't go insane.

  Pharoahe Monch

  Hate, Rap, Black And White

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• I will frankly tell you that my experience in prolonged scientific investigations convinces me that a belief in God-a God who is behind and within the chaos of vanishing points of human knowledge-adds a wonderful stimulus to the man who attempts to penetrate into the regions of the unknown.

  Louis Agassiz

  God, Knowledge, Science

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• ... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?

  Wallace Stegner

  Life, Wall, Exercise

  Wallace Stegner (1990). “The Spectator Bird”, p.101, Penguin

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• Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.

  Tana French

  Profound, Mind, Encounters

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• What could have been simply bizarre, sentimental or contrived here becomes an utterly absorbing love story. [...] This is early days in the festival, but Rust and Bone has to be a real contender for prizes, and, the odds will be shortening to vanishing point for Cotillard getting the best actress award.

  Peter Bradshaw

  Real, Awards, Odds

  "Cannes 2012: Rust and Bone – review". www.theguardian.com. May 17, 2012.

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• Paolo Uccello's wife told people that Paolo used to stay up all night in his study trying to work out the vanishing points of his perspective. When she called him to come to bed, he would say "Oh what a lovely thing this perspective is!"

  Giorgio Vasari

  Night, Work Out, Wife

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• Necessary, since every moment in our lives is marked by death, like a shadow from another realm, it appear to us like a vanishing point for everything. How can one meditate on live without meditating too on its brevity, its precariousness, its fragility?

  Andre Comte-Sponville

  Shadow, Fragility, Vanishing

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• This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it--my face as personal vanishing point.

  Lucy Grealy

  Vanishing, Faces, Unbearable

  Lucy Grealy (1994). “Autobiography of a Face”, p.18, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Ideas, Mind

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.25, W. W. Norton & Company

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• In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.

  George Santayana

  Justice, Heaven, World

  "Interpretations of Poetry and Religion" by George Santayana, (p. 54), 1900.

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