Quotes About Perception

So what Epictetus was telling his students was that there can be no such thing as being the "victim" of another. You can only be a "victim" of yourself. It's all in how you discipline your mind. Who

Do what you will, reputation is at least as fickle as your station in life. Others decide what your reputation is.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.

Being in trouble can have a funny effect on the mind. I don't know if I can explain this. You go through some days and you seem to be hearing people and you seem to be talking to them and you seem to be doing your work, or, at least, your work gets done; but you haven't seen or heard a soul and if someone asked you what you have done that day you'd have to think awhile before you could answer.

The life you think you should want ... is always the life that looks safest.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.

The Spanish, contrary to a widespread misconception, do not eat hot, heavily seasoned food. They use very little pepper and very few herbs. I believe this conception of the Spanish diet must have originated in Texas, where they do Mexican and Spanish dishes in the hottest manner I know.

He thought as a sage, though he felt as a man.

Be ignorance thy choice, where knowledge leads to woe.

I don't know if there is a gene for comedy, but my dad was a very funny man. He just didn't know it. He was a naturally funny character, and when my brother and I would laugh at things he said and did, he would say, 'What do you think is so funny?'

Although I now call him 'Sting' to his face, I can still distinguish 'Sting' from 'Gordon Sumner'.

When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, this is certainly not like we thought it was." - Rumi

The boundary between the real and the unreal had been let down in Foote's mind, and between the comings and goings of the cloud-shadows and the dark errands of the ghosts there was no longer any way of making a selection. He had entered the cobwebby borderland between the human and the animal, where nothing is ever more than half true, and only as much as half true for the moment. ("There Shall Be No Darkness")

The omelette tasted like flannel.

We inhabit two universes, then, One is the universe inside our skulls - our viewpoint universe, as it were.

Truth is a lagging indicator in politics.

For scores of millions of Americans, Clinton's "caring" was more important than his lying.

Instead of revealing the will of the people, election results are often only a one-day snapshot of transient mass delusions.

A lie that is accepted by a sufficient number of ignorant voters becomes a political truth.

A great many grown-up and intelligent people believe, or pretend to believe, that by behaving in a friendly and accommodating way to our attackers, we will show them that they have nothing to fear from us and so defuse their wrath. The idea that such behavior would be taken by a ruthless and implacable enemy only as a sign of weakness is as foreign to them as the idea of honor itself.

I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.