Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naïvely suppose that people are as we imagine them to be … Although the possibility of gross deception is infinitely greater here than in our perception of the physical world, we still go on naïvely projecting our own psychology into our fellow human beings. In this way everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships based essentially on projection.

Carl Jung, Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of His Writings 1905-61

Gheyn, Jacob De II, Vanitas Still-Life
1603

What are the elements of an act of knowing? At least two are immediately obvious: that which is known, and the consciousness which knows it. The knower’s status is at least as important as that of the known, a point which modern physics has been forced to recognize in the uncertainty principle, which reveals the fact that, in order to know something about it, an observer must act upon, and thus disturb, an object. The act of knowing is thus a transaction between the object and the knower which involves physical exchanges of energy. Thus the concept of pure “parallelism”—a reflection within the knower of the known—is not tenable. We cannot think of the known as pure reflection within the knower, like the image of a flying swan on the smooth surface of a pond. When the swan lights on the water, its pure image is shattered by the broken surface.

Arthur M. Young, The Geometry of Meaning

Give a rose blood and it really blossoms.

Väinö Kirstinä, tr. by Herbert Lomas, from Contemporary Finnish Poetry: “Rose and Apple”