Quotes About Perception

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

The man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one.

All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it.

It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.

He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you.

As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.

I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones.

Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place- whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won't pretend to say.

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.

Una buona reputazione professionale non è sempre garanzia di un intelletto equilibrato.

I am stupid, am I not? What more can I want? If you ask them who is brave--who is true--who is just--who is it they would trust with their lives?--they would say, Tuan Jim. And yet they can never know the real, real truth....

Everything is inconceivable. The whole world is inconceivable to the strict logic of ideas. And yet the world exists to our senses, and we exist in it. There must be a necessity superior to our conceptions.

It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be.

all this life, must be life, since it is so much like a dream.

A fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe.

For you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape.

True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present position. It would have alarmed his superiors, and done away with his chances of promotion.

We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember

We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the August light of abiding memories.

He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything?