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Perception Quotes
"The gods are blind and men see only what they wish."
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"Everything's uglier up close.Not you."
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"The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth."
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"The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye."
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"There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people."
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"Its like reproaching someone who has no ear for music because he's bored at a symphony concert. Is it fair to blame me because you ascribed to me qualities that I hadn't got? I never tried to deceive you by pretending I was anything I wasn't. I was just pretty and gay. You don't ask for a pearl necklace or a sable coat at a booth in a fair, you ask for a tin trumpet and a toy balloon."
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"I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several."
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"That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities, now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way."
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"The feeling that the world is full of people who think different is synonymous with wrong."
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"The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it."
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"When the human being says:'It is not true...'He may mean:'I don't know about it, so I think it is untrue.'Or:'I don't like it."
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"In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose."
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"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
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"A snake bites your ankle.Recoiling, you scream.Fearing poison, your mind slips into a dream......where a man bites your ankle.Expecting no guile, 'Again' softly falls from your lips with a smile.Yet the man and the snake are the same.Your perception is only to blame."
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"It seemed natural; natural to the moment's peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, unquestioning reality one feels when one is drunk."
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"People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes."
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"What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?"
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"Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying."
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"If a Manx cat tells you that it is trying to preserve its long, beautiful tail, you don't have to believe it - especially if you have eyes."
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"It was queer how sometimes a child's innocent eyes can see things that grown men are blind to."
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"Your failure may put smiles on people's faces while your success squeezes tears from their eyes. Don't be deceived, it's just a charm to entice you to fall in love with mediocrity!"
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"It is commonly seen by experience that excellent memories do often accompany weak judgements."
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"People only picked the pretty, sweet-smelling flowers. The ones with thorns were left alone."
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"To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light."
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"Time stood still so she learnt to alter her focus."
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"You perception of a person, place, or thing may not be accurate. Just because it looks good does not mean it is good and vice versa. Always be aware of your surroundings. Pay attention to the people, places, and things around you. Don't allow your misperception to put you in an uncomfortable situation."
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"For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are."
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"We are immensed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision."
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"REFLECTIONS OF A MIRRORBeautiful is he who recognizes what is truly beautiful,Even if the surface is ugly.Truthful is he who says what is true,Even if the truth is ugly.Ugly is he who measures beauty by its exterior,Without first weighing the interior.And ugly is the man who judges harshly what he sees looking out,Without first judging what he sees in the mirror."
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"He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?"
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"No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes."
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"Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture."
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"Here too it's masquerade, I find: As everywhere, the dance of mind.I grasped a lovely masked procession,And caught things from a horror show, I'd gladly settle for a false impression,If it would last a little longer, though."
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"If I hold my head to the left and look down at the handle grips and front wheel and map carrier and gas tank I get one pattern of sense data. If I move my head to the right I get another slightly different pattern of sense data. The two views are different. The angles of the planes and curves of the metal are different. The sunlight strikes them differently. If there's no logical basis for substance then there's no logical basis for concluding that what's produced these two views is the same motorcycle."
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"Would you mind repeating that? I'm afraid I might have lost my wits altogether and just hallucinated what I've longed to hear."
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"Until you see beauty everywhere, in every face, until then, you are blind."
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"Because a spoon is made of gold does not change the soup's taste."
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"But even though she was attractive, there was something else about her that caught his eye. She was intelligent, he could sense that right away, and confident, too, as if she were able to move through life on her own terms. To him, these were the things that really mattered. Without them, beauty was nothing."
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"We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman."
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"It is what you think it is that makes it so, and not necessarily what it really is."
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"These superhero and mythical stories have, in many cases, replaced Biblical stories as vehicles for communal myths, but they are hardly any better than ancient magical adventures tinged with mythical archetypes and the decidedly unnuanced black - and - white struggle between good and evil."
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"It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble."
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"I don't know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig-tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to the earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach."
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"And because she worshipped joy, Kira seldom laughed and did not go to see comedies in theaters. And because she felt a profound rebellion against the weighty, the tragic, the solemn, Kira had a solemn reverence for those songs of defiant gaiety."
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"I know it's not the right thing to say to a lady, miss, but you are sweating like a pig!"My mother always said that horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies merely glow"Is that so? Well, miss, you are glowing like a pig!"
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"Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide."
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"One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me not to rest so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always."
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"I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth."
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"We live in a strange world where people don't try to know who we are, rather they go by, what they think we are!"
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"Living in a monastery, even as a guest rather than a monk, you have more opportunities than you might have elsewhere to see the world as it is, instead of through the shadow that you cast upon it."
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