Quotes About Perception

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is' My answer to that would be, 'No.'

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No'.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

As a matter of fact, no one is more tiresome than the person who can understand only realism in art. It shows a rather low artistic mentality never to believe anything you see unless it appears to be real. One must be willing to allow that symbolic things also mirror realities and sometimes provide greater esthetic pleasure than the merely realistic.

The important thing is that each one feel for himself the specific expressive quality of a theme or, similarly, an entire piece of music. And if it is a great work of art, don't expect it to mean exactly the same thing to you each time you return to it.

As a matter of fact, the experience of most composers has been that the more complete a theme is the less possibility there is of seeing it in various aspects. If the theme itself, in its original form, is long enough and complete enough, the composer may have difficulty in seeing it in any other way. It already exists in its definitive form. That is why great music can be written on themes that in themselves are insignificant.

For many years, I believed Him to be a god. I was instrumental in spreading the belief myself.' 'You still believe it'. 'I know what I know. A god or not, His power renders Him indistinguishable from divinity'.

There is a saying, drawn from the ages of Old Earth and written by a council of Ancient Merican kings, that all men were created equal. I'd often wondered if the words sounded as false and idealistic to those men's ears as they did to mine. Truly, humanity has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

One of the strangest elements in travelling to other worlds is the way people smell. It isn't a matter of hygiene, simply a case of different foods, different oils and soaps for cleaning, meaning skin, hair, sweat and breath is always vastly different, world to world.

La diferencia que existe entre los dioses y los demonios depende sobre todo del lado en que uno se encuentre en ese momento.

The thing is, women try to look slim-hipped like men, and they can't. Not if they have any female hormones. The very thing that makes a woman so lovely is exactly what you have: a big, beautiful trochanteric subcutaneous adipose tissue deposit.

When I walk into a house and see good paintings on the wall, I can smell money. But when I see tatty old carpets on the floor under them, I smell real money.

About what you'd expect, was Gideon's grumpy and uncharitable thought, if you crossed John Gielgud with W. C. Fields.

Ah!" Callie said, seizing on this, "what we expect of him. Couldn't that be the problem right there? Have we tried to attune ourselves to his needs? Have we taken the trouble to understand where he's coming from?

his bland blue eyes not perceiving an essential difference in worth between the diseased or injured whore and the best citizen of the city.

She had never inadvertently hit on a straight woman, or misidentified a lesbian in her life. Of course she usually also only dated on Goodreads, where most people had social media identify their gender preferences. However,

Art is... a question mark in the minds of those who want to know what's happening.

Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

I've always maintained that film directors understand architecture a hundred times better than architects do.

Exhibitions are precisely what we shouldn't trust, because they are so seductive. We go into a room that we can only walk through in a certain way, and there's a certain lighting scheme, and it might smell a certain way. Whereas when we read something on a blog, we do that in our own home, in the conditions that we have chosen, and we can determine how our body is situated. We just can't do those things in an exhibition.

The imaginary friends I had as a kid dropped me because their friends thought I didn't exist.

I think you should know that real-life white people are not all as funny as the ones on 'Seinfeld'.

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.