The Matter With Things Quotes by Iain McGilchrist
These are not different ways of thinking about the world: they are different ways of being in the world.
Iain McGilchrist • The Master and His Emissary
The left hemisphere world is characterised by what is familiar and fully expressible in language; the right hemisphere is more open to and attentive towards whatever is ‘other’, and can be only indirectly expressed. The left hemisphere is less capable of Keats’s ‘negative capability’ – ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritab... See more
Iain McGilchrist • Moving on
central theme of this book is the importance of our disposition towards the world and one another, as being fundamental in grounding what it is that we come to have a relationship with, rather than the other way round. The kind of attention we pay actually alters the world: we are, literally, partners in creation.
Iain McGilchrist • The Master and His Emissary
We know that we are neither as active in choosing where we direct our attention, nor as passive in the process of seeing, as this account suggests.
Iain McGilchrist • The Master and His Emissary
We see things by seeing them as something. In this sense too we create the world by attending to it in a particular way.
Iain McGilchrist • The Master and His Emissary
The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconn
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