Quotes About Perception

They're not going to send a crazy man out to be killed, are they?" "Who else will go?

Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.

Gold was not sure of many things, but he was definite about one: for every successful person he knew, he could name at least two others of greater ability, better, and higher intelligence who, by comparison, had failed.

That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed. 'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed. Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn't quite sure that he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art…

It's a wise person, I guess, who knows he's dumb, and an honest person who knows he's a liar. And it's a dumb person, I guess, whose convinced he's wise...-Bob Slocum

That's another thing that pisses me off about that Michelangelo statue of me in Florence. He's got me standing there uncircumcised! Who the fuck did he think I was?

I frequently feel I'm being taken advantage of merely because I'm asked to do the work I'm paid to do.

Little by little, or maybe all at once, everything comes to mean its opposite; unreason argues itself into reason, and vice versa, and we cannot see the seams.

Maybe I am senile already and people are too kind to tell me. People are not kind and would tell me. (Maybe people have told me, and I'm too senile to remember).

Clevinger is a very bright guy, a Harvard man, who knows everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

Oh, they're there all right, Orr had assured him about the flies in Appleby's eyes after Yossarian's fist fight in the officers' club, although he probably doesn't even know it. That's why he can't see things as they really are. How come he doesn't know it? inquired Yossarian. Because he's got flies in his eyes, Orr explained with exaggerated patience. How can he see he's got flies in his eyes if he's got flies in his eyes?

Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him.

They think that they're smart and that the rest of us are dumb.

He woke up blinking with a slight pain in his head and opened his eyes upon a world boiling in chaos in which everything was in proper order.

Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out

There was no way of really knowing anything, he knew, not even that there was no way of really knowing anything.

First impressions die slowly, bad impressions take even longer

General Peckem even recommends that we send our men into combat in full-dress uniform so they'll make a good impression on the enemy when they're shot down.

He could not make them shut-up; they were worse than women. They had not brains enough to be introverted and repressed.

I've always depended very heavily on the good opinion of others.

You've got flies in your eyes. That's why you can't see them.

The years are too short, the days are too long.

You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age?

I have some decades to spare. Do you know how long a year takes when it's going away?