Quotes About Perception

Dear me, you are being truthful today," he said, with remarkable perspicuity. "Life has got awfully dramatic all of a sudden, hasn't it? Just like a fiction.…

Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything—or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

Beauty alters the grain of reality.

What if you had never seen the sea before? What if the only thing you'd ever seen was a child's picture—blue crayon, choppy waves? Would you know the real sea if you only knew the picture? Would you be able to recognize the real thing even if you saw it? You don't know what Dionysus looks like. We're talking about God here. God is serious business.

I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you.

Her death the dividing mark: Before and After. And though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colors than ordinary

Harriet was going to be in the eighth grade next year; and what she had not expected was the horrifying new indignity of being classed-for the first time ever-a Teen Girl: a creature without mind, wholly protuberance and excretion, to judge from the literature she was given.

It was like staring into a clear pool that seemed shallow, inches deep, but you might toss a coin in that glassy water and it would fall and fall, spiralling down forever without even striking the bottom.

my diddy said it was something wrong with any man that'll sit down in a chair and read a book.

III. We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. —FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

The gesture was, to me, tremendously touching and all of a sudden I realised I had been wrong about these people. These were good people, common people; the salt of the earth; people whom I should count myself fortunate to know.

Maybe, I thought- reaching in the bag, taking out a stack of money and looking it over- maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in. You didn't feel anything at first.

is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial.

It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.

I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond

I thought (erroneously) that he dressed like Alfred Douglas, or the Comte de Montesquiou: beautiful starchy shirts with French cuffs; magnificent neckties; a black greatcoat that billowed behind him as he walked and made him look like a cross between a student prince and Jack the Ripper.

Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent.

La belleza altera la textura de la realidad.

Todos los grandes cuadros son en realidad autorretratos.

I never realized, you know, how much we rely on appearances," he said. "It's not that we're so smart, it's just that we don't look like we did it. We might as well be a bunch of Sunday-school teachers as far as everyone else is concerned. But these guys won't be taken in by that.

Once, to my delight, I even saw him wearing pince-nez. (Later, I discovered that they weren't real prince-nez, but only had glass in them, and that his eyes were a good deal sharper than my own.)

she really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses that tore at my very heart

how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet -- for me, anyway -- all that's worth living for lies in that charm?

No siempre se saca el bien de las buenas obras ni el mal de las malas obras. Ni siquiera los sabios y los buenos pueden ver la finalidad de todas sus acciones.