Quotes About Perception

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.

We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.

A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It

The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This

Each is liable to panic, which is, exactly, the terror of ignorance surrendered to the imagination.

I become the transparent eyeball...

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.

Turn the eye upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!

It is not often the worst trait that occasions the loudest outcry. Men complain of their suffering and not of the crime.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him ... I see not how it can be otherwise.

The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent we have discovered afterward that much was accomplished and much was begun in us.

we are what we know.

The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet.

A subtle chain of countless rings The next unto the farthest brings; The eye reads omens where it goes, And speaks all languages the rose; And, striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form.

Each moment of the year has its own beauty

He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry.

Love is as much its demand as perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without the other.

We know more from nature than we can at will communicate. Its light flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its presence.

The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other. We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more. I feel the same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neighbors, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.