Quotes About Perception

When you see a Gauguin, you think, This man is living in a dream world. When you see a van Gogh, you think, This dream world is living in a man.

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.

This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch.

The fear of being judged as weak or naïve prevents many people from operating like givers at work.

A medida que adquirimos conocimientos sobre un campo, nos convertimos en prisioneros de nuestros prototipos.

When ideas survive it's not because they're true - it's because they are interesting. What makes an idea interesting is that it changes our weakly heald opinions.

The minds of women are, in some degree, weaker than those of men, and are not so well able to comprehend a thing which is appreciable only by the intellect.

We do our best to hear from God, but we are all a bit spiritually hard of hearing. Our own convictions sometimes get intermingled with what we believe God is saying to us. None of us knows everything. We're all shaped by our environment and limited in our understanding. We do our best to hear from God, but we hear God through our individual filters, our preconceived ideas and convictions. This

I had never understood before the invisibility of a human. How what we take to be a person is in fact a spirit we can never see.

This is the thing: He isn't calling about his exam. I don't want to know that, but I do. He's calling to be reassured about something he can't put into words yet. I glimpsed it in him when he was young, but told myself, No, don't imagine that. Children have stages; he'll change. Then the words started running out of him in a torrent, and I knew they were being chased out by a force he couldn't see. What was I supposed to say to Margaret? That I see it in him?

the simplest way to block out the strangeness of time passing before your eyes is to fix it in place, to edit it down to monuments or potted plants.

For once, there was nothing to be disappointed in. Which left me with just the feeling of the disappointment itself.

I had never understood before the invisibility of a human. How what we take to be a person is in fact a spirit we can never see. Not until I sat in that room, with the dead vehicle that had carried my brother through his life, and for which I had always mistaken him.

I'm going to say this once,' he said, 'so you had better listen. You're twelve years old and you have a lot of ideas in your head, but nothing will wreck you quicker than if you let yourself confuse what's real and what isn't, you hear me?

I hadn't expected much from the place, but I hadn't realized how ugly it would be, either. We

It seemed as if a glaze had been washed from my senses, brightening the sound of the traffic up ahead on the avenue, separating the bus's pneumatic brakes from the bass chug of the delivery-truck engines and the whir and bump of gliding taxis.

the motion of our blood could almost stop, our bodies be laid to sleep, but somehow the soul be kept alive. Simply by the things we saw and heard, in any given moment

There was just the sensation of it. A

Christian talk, when said in a non-Christian way, scares these Southerners to death.

The key to fighting in the dark is no different: you had to perceive your opponent, sense him, and never use your imagination. The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

Stories are factual...If a man and his story are in conflict it is the man who must change.....In America it is the man who matters not the story.

Old women look all innocent and goody-two-shoes, but then they level some all-knowing eyes on your ass.

Was it this image of the woman she once was that made her fingers tremble? Or did she feel for this man in her bed who'd quietly started weeping for reasons she didn't understand?

The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked through during the day. At night, they were things you looked into. You looked into the stars, you looked into dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps. No one ever stared at the tip of a cigarette in the daylight hours...