I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

Every song has a memory; every song has the ability to make or break your heart, shut down the heart, and open the eyes. But I’m afraid if you look at a thing long enough; it loses all of its meaning

The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.

If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

Everything becomes questionable as soon as I consider it closely, everything slips away and dissolves.

Young man,' Porbus said, seeing Poussin stare open-mouthed at a picture, 'Don't look at the canvas too long, it will drive you to despair.

But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

We seem never to know what any thing means or is worth until we have lost it.

When was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake? Ordinary life passes in a near blur. If we go to the theatre or the cinema, the images before us change constantly, and there is the distraction of language. Our loved ones are so well known to us that there is no need to look at them, and one of the gentle jokes of married life is that we do not.

I have always said that you do not see a thing until you look away from it. In other words, an object or a fact in nature has not become itself until it has been projected in the realm of the imagination. Therefore what has been retained in the mind’s eye is what lives. I have seldom or never worked from nature for this reason and so what I see is what I believe to be true, and that becomes the truism of the creative artist.

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.