Quotes About Perception

He said, 'Then you don't know, Philippa, what I am.' 'I know what you think you are,' Philippa said.

Come in,' he said. 'You can use Adam's rooms.' His hand, moving upwards, drew the fair, tangled hair clear of Lymond's eyes and checked, at the shudder that ran jarring through from his fingertips. Lymond dropped his hands. He made no protest. He did not look up. But unimpeded at last, Jerott could see the look on his face and give it, sickeningly, its correct interpretation.

Señor, more wine? I am amazed,' said the captain, 'that so lovely a lady has not married.' 'But indeed she has married,' said Lymond. 'Five times. And not one husband, poor fellow, survived matrimony by more than a year. She is too good for them. The last one, dying, compared her to a nugget of gold. Do you melt it or do you rub it or do you beat it, said he, it shineth still more orient.

She's got sense, that girl; and too much backbone to push herself where she's not wanted. Tell her it's no good, and she'll soon see the point.

What had you expected? A viper, or a devil, or a ravening idiot; Milo with the ox on his shoulders, Angra-Mainyo prepared to do battle with Zoroaster, or the Golden Ass? Or didn't you know the family colouring? Richard hasn't got it. Poor Richard is merely Brown and fit to break bread with …

Extraordinary, is it not, how he cannot bear music?

What about Odysseus?' said Kiaya Khátún. Marthe turned away, and moved to the door. 'He is not a man,' she said. 'He is Chaos, a mythical bird with a name, but no body; agreeable only to the eye of the mind.

Richard's angry grey eyes … honest grey eyes … were looking at him. Sybilla was not watching. He supposed she knew that however near he might tread to the crevasse, he did not mean to fall in, and drag Richard with him. Instinct had been right, when last year he had fled such a confrontation. As no living soul could hurt him, Sybilla could.

Quel changement, Strozzi had said, and it was true. The change was there, and not only in the chamois and lawn, replacing the velvet, the rubies, the gold tissue. It was as if all about him had been stripped down and cleansed and reduced, without blurring, to its true structure. And his eyes, which were smiling, were clear.

I called you sister," he said. "Was I right?" "Yes," said Marthe. And hesitating: "What made you sure?" "The luggage of poetry you carry," said Francis Crawford; and far down in the tired eyes the smile lingered still. "Your other burdens I can also share.

A mind responsive to beauty is a storehouse with many rooms; words, sounds, textures, all the nobler exercises of the senses leave some image filed and folded to be summoned at need. There, too, the brutal images are kept: the sights and smells and hurts, real and imagined, which the responsive mind accepts and has bedded deep.

His horse stumbled in the tussocky ground and made him realize, then, how thoughtlessly fast he was riding...how thoughtlessly fast he was thinking.

A lie is a broad and spacious and glittering thing, sweeping belief before it from its very grandeur. But the truth fits, like an old man cutting cloth in an attic. And that, Philippa did not need to be told, was the truth, which Lymond had guessed long before her.

Lymond said, 'Have I been talking?' 'We all have, in nightmares. But yours have not been about the sea.

Khátún, what is his face?' 'A lemon?' said Philippa.

Nicholas formed the opinion that my lord Simon was untouched by time and probably by experience.

Then Richard said, 'That was crude, for you.' 'But as you will find,' said Lymond softly, addressing the sand, 'I am a very crude man.

But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.

To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.

Praise God (or whatever it is) from (if direction exists) whom (if personality exists) all blessings (if that word corresponds to any percept of objective reality) flow (if Heraclitus and Bergson and Einstein are correct in stating that everything is more or less flowing about).

A man was taken to the Zoo and shown the giraffe. After gazing at it a little in silence: 'I don't believe it,' he said.

Harriet was silent. She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, courteous, wealthy, well-read, amusing and enamoured, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of utter inferiority which leads to prostration and hero-worship. But she now realised that there was, after all, something god-like about him. He could control a horse.

In the terms in which you set it, the problem is unanswerable; but in the Kingdom of Heaven, those terms do not apply. You have asked the question in a form that is much too limited; the 'solution' must be brought in from outside your sphere of reference altogether.

Perhaps you didn't say much about him, mother, but Gerald said lots - dreadful things!' 'Yes,' said the Duchess, 'he said what he thought. The present generation does, you know. To the uninitiated, I admit, dear, it does sound a little rude.