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"We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself."
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Exlpore more Perception quotes

"Materialistic perception of life makes us spiritually shortsighted."

"Beauty is only there when you have the ability to see and appreciate it."

"Close your eyes to see the world with your imaginative mind."

"Light wears out the eyes but does not wear out the soul."

"What other people think is important to them. What you think has great importance to you."

"Maya (deceit) means that one cannot see the nature of things as they are but sees them in a different form."

"We each project to others a reflection of the world which includes our choices of perception."

"If your life is founded on what you can see then your success will be insignificant and very brief."

"We do not actually know other nations, we only know our judgements."

"The essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in livingcreatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only when they were inrepose, their minds untroubled, their bodies motionless."
Explore more quotes by Marilynne Robinson

"There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?"

"Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos, and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as it was before the small, anomalous flicker of human life appeared on this small, wildly atypical planet."

"So she prayed, Lord, give me patience. She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it....it cost her tears to think that her situation might actually be that desolate, so she prayed again for patience, for tact, for understanding--for every virtue that might keep her safe from conflicts that would be sure to leave her wounded, every virtue that might at least help her to preserve an appearance of dignity, for heaven's sake."

"There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding...If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is a posture of grace."

"Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view."

"For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries."

"Adulthood is a wonderful thing and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts. I believe the soul in Paradise must enjoy something nearer to a perpetual vigorous adulthood than to any other state we know."
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