Perception Quotes

As information processing machines, our ability to process data about the external world begins at the level of sensory perception. Although most of us are rarely aware of it, our sensory receptors are designed to detect information at the energy level. Because everything around us - the air we breathe, even the materials we use to build with, are composed of spinning and vibrating atomic particles, you and I are literally swimming in a turbulent sea of electromagnetic fields. We are part of it. We are enveloped within in, and through our sensory apparatus we experience what is.Each of our sensory systems is made up of a complex cascade of neurons that process the incoming neural code from the level of the receptor to specific areas within the brain. Each group of neurons along the cascade alters or enhances the code, and passes it on to the next set of cells in the system, which further defines and refines the message. By the time the code reaches the outermost portion of our brain, the higher levels of the cerebral cortex, we become conscious of the stimulation. However, if any of the cells along the pathway fail in their ability to function normally, then the final perception is skewed away from normal reality.

~ Jill Bolte Taylor

Art has been wrecked by a complete consciousness of the universe which shews that the world is to each man only a rubbish-heap limned by his individual perception. It will be saved, if at all, by the next and last step of disillusion; the realisation that complete consciousness and truth are themselves valueless, and that to acquire any genuine artistic titillation we must artificially invent limitations of consciousness and feign a pattern of life common to all mankind--most naturally the simple old pattern which ancient and groping tradition first gave us.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

People see what they expect to see.

~ Sara Sheridan

Writing the poems, I came to think that regarding is a form of love, but the regarding is not necessarily accurate. In the poems, people are always misperceiving one another. But misperceptions are a part of being alive to others. You don’t need truth or beauty. All you do is perceive. That’s all you need to have loved and lived fully.

~ Joy Katz

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large-- this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

~ Aldous Huxley

As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I'd lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age - just as a lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn't understand that clarity is in the mind.

~ Keith Johnstone

Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.

~ Aldous Huxley

It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing.

~ Sofia Kovalevskaya

A cell in our body may recognize that it is part of a greater whole, but it may never be able to define all that is beyond it simply because of its limited perceptive capacity. Likewise, all that makes up the universal consciousness will always lie just outside of our capacity to define it.

~ Rajeev Kurapati

Our response to the external conditions of our lives can be greatly altered by our perceptions of those conditions.

~ Kitt Weagant

...Understanding as had the ancients that angels and demons were identical- interchangeable archetypes- all a matter of polarity: the guardian angel who conquered your enemy in battle was perceived by your enemy as a demon destroyer...

~ Dan Brown

People seldom change. Only their masks do. It is only our perception of them and the perception they have of themselves that actually change.

~ Shannon L. Alder

The colour of the water seems to be the colour of the glass into which it has been poured'.

~ Idries Shah

People perceive the divine according to their own biases. That doesn’t make the experience any less real.

~ James Rozoff

The dial of the clock wears out unevenly; Most worn Is the area round eight. As it is stared at with abrasive glancesunfailingly twice a day, It is weathered away. On the other side The area at two Is only half as worn, For closed eyes at nightPass without stopping. If there is one who possesses a flat watch evenly worn, It is he who, failing at the start, is running one lap behind. Thus the world is always A lap fast--The world he thinks he sees Has not yet begun. Illusory time, When the hands stand vertically on the dial; Without the bell announcing the raising of the curtain, The play has come to an end.

~ Kōbō Abe

The intellect seeks to throw its own interpretation of the real over reality, and in so doing carves the world up into artificial little cubes.

~ James Rozoff

We have long laboured under an obtuse presupposition that the senses by which other living creatures perceive their world must to a great extent resemble our own; but in fact we are, by scientific invention, only now beginning to approach methods of perception that the whales have always owned as their birthright.

~ Gavin Maxwell

You make the best out of it, you can. Nothing is ever as good or as bad as you think it will be. It's what you make of it.

~ Nichole Chase

At that moment, he realised that he did not exist to her in the same way that he existed in his own perception. She held a copied version, an interpretation of him, filtered through the matrix of her priorities and desires.Therefore, surely, he only held a copy of her.

~ K.j. Bishop

I have seen a face with a thousand countenances, and a face that was but a single countenance as if held in a mould. I have seen a face whose sheen I could look through to the ugliness beneath, and a face whose sheen I had to lift to see how beautiful it was. I have seen an old face much lined with nothing, and a smooth face in which all things were graven. I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath.

~ Kahlil Gibran

But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Two blades clashed, ringing like a bell. Like all small boys, Philip thought his father was invincible; and this was the moment when he learned the truth.

~ Ken Follett

Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water.

~ Michael Cunningham

Tobias took the photograph. At least, that's what I saw. Most likely I still had the photograph in my hand, but I couldn't feel it there, now I perceived Tobias holding it. It's strange, the way the mind can change perception.

~ Brandon Sanderson

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

~ Cheryl Strayed

You're an intensely attractive woman. You do know that, don't you? To her silence, he replied, You'd believe me if you could see your

~ Tessa Dare

Reality is what one makes it. And the more negative reality one nurtures and creates, the more of it one has.

~ Benjamin Hoff

If you think you don't have enemies, then they have won.

~ Toba Beta

How you see and depict yourself will be the exact way people will treat you--Period, Think your worth millions, people will treat you like millions, think pennies, get treated like pennies

~ Treasure Blue

The revolution of consciousness is connected to the food revolution

~ Bryant Mcgill

Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally - oh, very rarely! - the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.

~ Robert E. Howard

Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if not young, then somehow transcend the time that otherwise marks the face. It is as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul.

~ Karl Ove Knausgård

As humans, reality for us is largely based on other people's perceptions. If there's 20 bodies in your crawl space but you haven't been caught yet, you tell yourself you're still a birthday clown, and that's how you keep doing it.

~ Dan Harmon

Imagine, Bishop, that you have a beloved cat, but that your cat is not with you. If you close your eyes and further imagine you are petting your cat, the same neurons in your brains are activated as if you were petting the actual cat. Our minds may know the difference between its models and reality itself, but it prefers its models. So much so that we apprehend reality through our models, rather than directly via the sense. When I'm speaking to you, I have a little bishop in my head, and though I speak out load, I'm speaking to my little bishop. When you answer, I can only perceive you through my model of you.Mentars also make models, but they don't apprehend reality through them. They end up, not with little people in their minds, but with highly complex rule sets. They relate to their models in the same way we relate to weather models, as things to consult, but not to conflate with external reality.

~ David Marusek

One who has lived through the days of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and the Japanese war lords feels something that a younger generation does not concerning the aberrations that are possible in this world.

~ Bernard Brodie

Love, far from being blind, is the very emotion that allows us to see.

~ Cristina Nehring

It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn't conciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them.

~ David Sedaris

Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Too often, it is only love that makes us engaged enough, alert enough, alive enough to see

~ Cristina Nehring

...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

~ David Foster Wallace