Quotes About Perception

He stepped back to let Pendergast do his thing, but he was surprised to see the agent not going through his usual rigmarole, with the test tubes and tweezers and loupes appearing out of nowhere and interminable fussing around.

Some things transcend even lunacy.

in our culture, women can do anything a man can. and vice versa. don alfonso's eyebrows shot up. i do not believe it. it's true, sally said defiantly. in America, the women hunt while the men have babies?

She, too, had an air of discipline and precision about her, but it was at odds with her aristocratic face, mane of rich mahogany hair, brown eyes, and civilian dress. The others were kitted out in body armor, helmets, night-vision gear, and assault weaponry: all she had was a string of pearls. Who in God's name would wear a string of pearls on a mission like this?

That's what humans do. We label, categorize, measure, and dissect because it gives us the illusion of control.

They use the label "anthropomorphization" as a cover, because they're scared that maybe we're all just animals after all!

many extremely well-organized people have illegible handwriting

Most people, in my experience, are a little thick. If not abundantly so.

You can not stare evil in the face; it has no face. It has no body, no bones, no blood. Any attempt to describe it ends in glibness and self-delusion.

You see, between me and life there is a mist of words always.

He carried the Lakota principle that he would render no judgments on anyone except through direct experience

You could tell a lot about a person by meeting his brother.

You see, what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our questioning. And what we are, of course, is a response to what we observe.

In Lake's experience, even eccentric and unconventional people carefully curated their persona. Very few truly didn't give a goddamn what others thought.

I remember shaking her hand while her eyes wandered about the room, looking over my head, at my feet—like a rude guest at a party.

Finally: there is always that in poetry which will not be grasped, which cannot be described, which survives our ardent attention, our critical theories, our classrooms, our late-night arguments. There is always (I am quoting the poet/translator Américo Ferrari) "an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

you look at me like an emergency

Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren't even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now?

If you think that people should be nice to one another, then by all means be nice. But when you project that belief onto the people and the world around you as if it were an objective reality, or worse still, as if it were their job to be nice to you, you put yourself at odds with what is, and suffering will surely follow.

When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that's something I've created. I've turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I've degraded you. I've made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.

We end up putting so much attention onto our image that we remain in a continuous state of protecting or improving our image in order to control how others see us.

When we believe what we think, when we take our thinking to be reality, we will suffer.

Awareness isn't something we own; awareness isn't something we possess. Awareness is actually what we are.