Quotes About Perception

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.

To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it... -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven

All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view.

We are immensed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.

Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.

All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood. -Is it so bad, then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood...

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none.

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.