Quotes About Perception

Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.

'Handsome' means many things to many people. If people consider me handsome, I feel flattered - and have my parents to thank for it. Realistically, it doesn't hurt to be good-looking, especially in this business.

The symbolism of the action has been replaced by the reality of the touch.

Nothing ages so quickly as yesterday's vision of the future.

Our thoughts are unseen hands shaping the people we meet. Whatever we truly think them to be, that's what they'll become for us.

The conscious water saw its God, and blushed.

The objectivity we sought was the power to recollect — if not in tranquillity, at least in 'dispassion' and this power is rarely granted except to the imaginative writer.

No one likes it, apart from blind people, and I'm sure even they can sense it's profound ugliness as it passes by.

For a German and a Finn, the truth is the truth. In Japan and Britain it is all right if it doesn't rock the boat. In China there is no absolute truth. In Italy it is negotiable.

What is said may be grammatically accurate or erroneous in the extreme, but it will be colored by the person's view of reality, which is itself influenced by the rigidity of his or her own language structure.

Americans using expressions like "You are killing me" or "Say that once again and I'll walk away from this deal" will cause great consternation among their Japanese partners.

Cultural and religious differences may make it impossible for some people to laugh at the same thing.

the Zulu language has 39 words for green.

The individualistic Spaniards consider the Swiss stuffy and excessively law-abiding. Lively Italians find Norwegians gloomy. French-influenced Vietnamese find Japanese impassive. Most South Americans find Argentineans conceited. Germans think Australians are undisciplined. Japanese see straight-talking Americans as rude.

French people feel intellectually superior also assumes that the French therefore think Italians are suitable mainly for manual labor when emigrating to France.

Swedes, Germans and Britons, when tested in a similar manner, do the same, selecting positive adjectives to describe their own culture.

The Kennedy brothers seemed neither as grand and omniscient as the "court histories" that sprang up after the president's assassination portrayed them, nor as cunning and shameless as later books, such as Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot, argued. They were both self-creative and self-destructive.

Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to people if they have barbarian8 souls.

Are you going out after the truth, or are you going out after something you believe?

Now, what did you say your name was?" Bill asked.9 "I'm Frank Sinatra." "And what is it that you do?" "I'm a singer." "I believe I've heard of you," said Bill, deadpan. "Well, I hope so," Sinatra replied with considerable grace.

The first chap we said was loafing, until he died. That's nearly always the verdict on a sailing ship, anyway. A man is invariably 'mouching' until he dies, and then we say, "Oh, he must have been bad after all." --Charles Lightoller

Vertebrate brains and objective reality do not fit together like the pieces of a puzzle, for the simple reason that we ourselves create every idea from our own 'objective reality.' 'Real reality,' outside our perception, inevitably remains a construct, and each of us has to decide where God figures in it.

Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?

Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract.