Perception Quotes

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend

~ Aldous Huxley

One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.

~ Anne Rice

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

We all see only that which we are trained to see.

~ Robert Anton Wilson

The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

~ Mignon Mclaughlin

That is certainly one way to look at the matter. There are others.

~ Patricia C. Wrede

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.

~ John Steinbeck

Surely you ain't weak.You just can't accept yourself as a strong person.

~ Toba Beta

O, wad some Power the giftie gie usTo see oursels as others see us!It wad frae monie a blunder free us,An' foolish notion.

~ Robert Burns

Have you thought about what it means to be a god? asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.

~ Neil Gaiman

Unity is vision, it must have been part of the process of learning to see.

~ Henry Adams

Your desire to advise other people, grows in line with your perception...that assumes you're wiser than them.

~ Toba Beta

[she used to say that] each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world – like a bride wears on her wedding day—except this kind of veil is invisible. we walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. the world is kind of blurry. we like it that way. but sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments – like there’s a wind blowing it from our faces – and when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. we see all the beauty and cruelty and sadness and love, but mostly we are happy not to. some people learn to lift the veils themselves. then they don’t have to depend on the wind anymore. ...it’s just her way of saying that most of the time people get distracted by little stuff, and ignore the big stuff.

~ Rebecca Stead

Recognizing isn't at all like seeing, the two often don't even agree.

~ Sten Nadolny

You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your perception...you see what is, where most people see what they expect.

~ Tsitsi Dangarembga

How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.

~ Umberto Eco

Perception is subjective.

~ Toba Beta

Internal mental experience is not the product of a photographic process. Internal reality is in fact constructed by the brain as it interacts with the environment in the present, in the context of its past experiences and expectancies of the future. At the level of perceptual categorizations, we have reached a land of mental representations quite distant from the layers of the world just inches away from their place inside the skull. This is the reason why each of us experiences a unique way of minding the world. (pp. 166-167)

~ Daniel J. Siegel

You can see a rose both in two ways. First, through its beautiful petals. The other, through its thorns

~ Aries Eroles

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.

~ Marilynne Robinson

The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.

~ Salman Rushdie

When your heart truly adores somebody, your mind perceives a halo on that man's head.

~ Toba Beta

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

~ W.h. Auden

Even if you have not awakened, if you realize that your perceptions and activities are all like dreams and you view them with detachment, not giving rise to grasping and rejecting discrimination, then this is virtually tantamount to awakening from the dream.

~ Muso Kokushi

I walked home, seeing all my doubt from the other side. Have you ever seen that? Like when you go on holiday. On the way back, everything is the same but it looks a little different than it did on the way. It's because you're seeing it backwards.

~ Markus Zusak

Stubborness and staunch, they are both same thingsfrom different point of view, such crazy and eccentric.

~ Toba Beta

When our poor, faultily sensitive vision can perceive a thing, we say that it is visible. When the nerves of touch can feel it, we say that it is tangible. Yet I tell you there are beings intangible to our physical sense, yet whose presence is felt by the spirit, and invisible to our eyes merely because those organs are not attuned to the light as reflected from their bodies. But light passed through the screen, which we are about to use has a wavelength novel to the scientific world, and by it you shall see with the eyes of the flesh that which has been invisible since life began. Have no fear! (Unseen - Unfeared)

~ Francis Stevens

What is seen by mind, is an environmental image that projected by public consciousness in vicinity.

~ Toba Beta

Attending church does not necessarily mean living the principles taught in those meeting. You can be active in a church but inactive in its gospel.

~ Stephen R. Covey

Shallan’s mental image of Jasnah Kholin was of someone almost divine. It was, upon reflection, an odd way to regard a determined atheist.

~ Brandon Sanderson

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. At the edge of perception, weird things dance and howl.

~ M.h. Boroson

I brought a picture with me that I had at home, of a girl in a swing with a castle and pretty blue bubbles in the background, to hang in my room, but that nurse here said the girl was naked from the waist up and not appropriate. You know, I've had that picture for fifty years and I never knew she was naked. If you ask me, I don't think the old men they've got here can see well enough to notice that she's bare-breasted. But, this is a Methodist home, so she's in the closet with my gallstones.

~ Fannie Flagg

To analyze or assess a person's failings or deficiencies,' he declared to himself, 'is useless, not because such blemishes are immovable, but because they affect the mass of beholders in diverse ways. Different minds perceive utterly variant figures in the same being.

~ A.e. Coppard

[A]s military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan.

~ Adam Gopnik

An hour later we were walking past rows of busy beach huts and weaving between sunbathers and Frisbee games. I was surprised that people weren't taking more notice of us. Everyone looked so strange to me that I couldn't believe I didn't look equally strange to them.

~ Alex Garland

Perceiving the world as well designed and thus the product of a designer, and even seeing divine providence in the daily affairs of life, may be the product of a brain adapted to finding patterns in nature. (38)

~ Michael Shermer

There is no single thing... that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says 'I am more than just my appearance'. If each object quivers with readiness to imply something other than itself, if each perception is a word in a poem dense with connotations, then the poet's selection of any given subject of speculation will become... a means of attuning himself to the rhythms and harmonies of reality at large. ... The notion of a network of correspondence is not an outmoded Romantic illusion: it represents a crucial intuition...

~ Roger Cardinal

A blind man sees with his cane, like all the rest of us.

~ Marty Rubin