Quotes About Perception

I write about it not because I understand it, but because I don't.

Sully understood this to be true, though it was a fairly recent phenomenon. Ruth had witnessed and reported it with considerable irritation. It couldn't have been the case when he was married to Vera, because his wife had kept a careful, detailed list of the things he did of which she disapproved, and she was not the sort of woman to hold anything back. She surely would have mentioned it if he'd slept with his eyes open.

But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth—that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimes don't know people as well as we think we do, that the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.

the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.

If your educe sculpture to the flat plane of the temporal experience of the work. (...) the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception.

Measure not God's love and favour by your own feeling. The sun shines as clearly in the darkest day as it does in the brightest. The difference is not in the sun, but in some clouds which hinder the manifestation of the light thereof.

In the godly, holy truths are conveyed by way of a taste; gracious men have a spiritual palate as well as a spiritual eye. Grace alters the spiritual taste.

If you love me, Henry, you don't love me in a way I understand.

Cognition begins with sensation.

The suggestive patterning and often delicate precision of detail in such coincidences notoriously escape the net of objective assessments and experimental tests. Synchronicities seem to constitute a lived reality the experience of which depends deeply on the sensitive perception of context and nature.

And do I perhaps miss the point altogether? Is the guy who wears Tommy on his back participating in a clever, knowing, postmodern joke, whose unspoken text is that we all secretly care about labels, so why not acknowledge that in big campy letters? It may be. But I don't think so.

Personally, I didn't celebrate Christmas or believe in Santa Claus. Mama tried to convince me otherwise, but I was adamant. It didn't make sense to me why any white man would take a night out of the year to bring us gifts. Anyway, what did it matter if a man masked himself in religion one day and the next wore the white hood?

Our beliefs do not sit passively in our brains waiting to be confirmed or contradicted by incoming information. Instead, they play a key role in shaping how we see the world.

When you gossip about another person, listeners unconsciously associate you with the characteristics you are describing, ultimately leading to those characteristics' being "transferred" to you. So, say positive and pleasant things about friends and colleagues, and you are seen as a nice person. In contrast, constantly complain about their failings, and people will unconsciously apply the negative traits and incompetence to you.

Albert Einstein once said, "Sit with a beautiful woman for an hour and it seems like a minute, sit on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour—that's relativity.

This may sound somewhat obvious but, as the French philosopher Voltaire once famously pointed out, the main problem with common sense is that it is not so common.

when I tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the maturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them.

At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering.

Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires

The world of most men is given to them by their culture..

Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality. --Richard Wright to William Faulkner

I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book.

You're trying to believe in yourself. And every time you try to find a way to live, your own mind stands in the way. You know why that is? It's because others have said you were bad and they made you live in bad conditions. When a man hears that over and over and looks about him and sees that his life is bad, he begins to doubt his own mind. His feelings drag him forward and his mind, full of what others say about him, tells him to go back