Quotes About Perception

The innocent supposition, entertained by most people, that even if they are not brilliant, they are not dumb, is correct only in a very relative sense.

Do you thinking not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?"--Robert Redford from the 1975 movie Three Days of the Condor

You mean how do I know you are who you say you are?" Merle shrugged. "How do you know anybody is who they say they are?" She shook her head. "We lie to ourselves about who we see, we lie to ourselves about who we are. Then we buy our own lies and try to spend them as our lives.

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.

Perceiving Clearly The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. William James (1842-1910) Can we trust what we perceive? William James pointed to another attribute of attention: it helped augment the ''clearness of all that we perceive or conceive.

The acceptance of the gift of freedom transforms our perception of our social and political existence.

Klan women and men saw themselves not as bigoted extremists but as good Christians and good patriots joining proudly in a moral crusade.

Truth knows no color it appeals to intelligence.

We want people to realize you are at a design school, not a land grant college. The way we look says a great deal about who we are.

Have you noticed how just trying to impose any sort of chronology on events makes it seem as though a lot of time has been occupied?

Over the years I knew her she always looked at me like that - as though I was a quite pleasant but amusing object - and it always did the same thing to me. It's difficult to put into words but perhaps I can best describe it by saying that if I had been a little dog I'd have gone leaping and gambolling around the room wagging my tail furiously.

No animal is a better judge of comfort than a cat

Ideas we don't know we have, have us.

I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.

Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.

We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.

We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, What's wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?

It's very hard to know what wisdom is.

you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.

Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.

I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche...

To be sane, we must recognise our beliefs as fictions.

It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence," wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, "We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.