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"Thus the same object may supply a practical perception to one person and a speculative one to another, or the same person may perceive it partly practically and partly speculatively."
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"Say, there is a book written by Tolstoy sitting right there on the table. To our unique human consciousness, the reality of the papers in the book, is infinitely different from the valuable literature that they possess. For the kind of consciousness possessed by the bug which eats those papers, literature is non-existent, yet for the Human Consciousness, literature has a greater value of truth than the papers themselves."

"The puzzle that is created by seeing the 'relative' is called worldly life (sansaar)! It would never be this way had one seen the 'Real'."

"The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right."

"All seems infected that the infected spy as all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye."

"You can see the whole entire world in the eyes of a person who knows how to simply stand there and take all of it into him but then you can look into the eyes of someone else and the whole entire world goes away and all that's left is you."

"Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction."

"Overconfidence blurs out the risk. Inferiority magnifies it."

"Only the eye that sees can differentiate a flower from leaves."

"Seeing's believing but feeling's the truth."
Explore more quotes by Samuel Alexander


"What is the meaning of the togetherness of the perceiving mind, in that peculiar modification of perceiving which makes it perceive not a star but a tree, and the tree itself, is a problem for philosophy."


"It may be added, to prevent misunderstanding, that when I speak of contemplated objects in this last phrase as objects of contemplation, the act of contemplation itself is of course an enjoyment."


"But though cognition is not an element of mental action, nor even in any real sense of the word an aspect of it, the distinction of cognition and conation has if properly defined a definite value."


"It is convenient to distinguish the two kinds of experience which have thus been described, the experienc-ing and the experienc-ed, by technical words."


"The perceptive act is a reaction of the mind upon the object of which it is the perception."


"When we come to images or memories or thoughts, speculation, while always closely related to practice, is more explicit, and it is in fact not immediately obvious that such processes can be described in any sense as practical."


"An object is not first imagined or thought about and then expected or willed, but in being actively expected it is imagined as future and in being willed it is thought."


"For psychological purposes the most important differences in conation are those in virtue of which the object is revealed as sensed or perceived or imaged or remembered or thought."
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