Quotes About Perception

W: Nobody's so gullible as scientists. All the phony mediums say so. Can't quite see why. J: Oh, yes, it would be so. They think they know, you see. That's always dangerous. ~Wharton; Jessop

It was so hard to get an idea of people you had never seen. You had to rely on other people's judgment. ... Other people's impressions were no good to you. They might be just as true as yours but you couldn't act on them. You couldn't, as it were, use another person's angle of attack.

Lo imposible no puede haber sucedido; por tanto, lo imposible tiene que ser posible, a pesar de las apariencias.

The two words expressed volumes.

You should always pay attention to your instincts.

Faces are tricky unless you can connect up when and where you'd seen them.

She couldn't let the past go and she could never see the future as it really was, only as she imagined it to be.

Men have courage-one knows that...but they are more easily deceived than women.

What a newspaper prints is news – but not always truth!

A secret de Polichinelle is a secret that everyone can know. For this reason the people who do not know it never hear about it - for if everyone thinks you know a thing, nobody tells you.

É il cervello, le piccole cellule grigie» si batté una mano sulla fronte, «la cosa su cui bisogna basarsi. I sensi inducono in errore. Bisogna cercare la verità dal di dentro, non dal di fuori.»

the horror of sitting at a tea table, looking across at my best loved friend, and suddenly realising that the person sitting there was a stranger. That, I think, describes best what Archie was like when he came. He went through the motions of ordinary greetings, but he was, quite simply, not Archie.

About Miss Debenham," he said rather awkwardly. "You can take it from me that she's all right. She's a pukka sahib. "What," asked Dr. Constantine with interest, "does a pukka sahib mean?" "It means," said Poirot, "that Miss Debenham's father and brothers were at the same kind of school as Colonel Arbuthnot was." "Oh!" said Dr. Constantine, disappointed. "Then it has nothing to do with the crime at all." "Exactly," said Poirot.

The man who came into the room did not look as though his name was, or could have ever been, Robinson. It might have been Demetrius, or Isaacstein, or Perenna - though not one or the other in particular. He was not definitely Jewish, nor definitely Greek nor Portugese nor Spanish, nor South American. What did seem highly unlikely was that he was an Englishman called Robinson.

there is nothing more amazing than the extraordinary sanity of the insane! Unless it is the extraordinary eccentricity of the sane!

Don't be a fool," Vera Claythorne urged herself. "It's all right. Elly Kleinman and others are downstairs. All four of them. There's no one in the room. There can't be. You're imagining things, my girl.

If thing is as clear as daylight, mistrust it! someone has made it so!

The new world was the same as the old. The houses were different, the streets were called Closes, the clothes were different, the voices were different, but the human beings were the same as they always had been. And though using slightly different phraseology, the subjects of conversation were the same.

Miss Greenshaw appeared to have no fear of burglars, and was probably justified, as most things in the house weighed several tons and were of no marketable value.

They all fuss about me so," she said. "They rub it in that I'm an old woman." "And you don't feel like one." "No, I don't, Jane. In spite of all my aches and pains–and I've got plenty. Inside I go on feeling just like a chit like Gina. Perhaps everyone does. The glass shows them how old they are and they just don't believe it.

Have you ever reflected, Madame, on the enormous part that Hearsay plays in life. "Mr. A said," "Mrs. B. told us." "Miss C. explained why –" and so on. And if the known facts seem to fit with what we have been told, then we never question them. There are so many things that do not concern us, and so we do not bother to uncover the actual facts.

I was wrong about that young man of yours. A man when he is making up to anybody can be cordial and gallant and full of little attentions and altogether charming. But when a man is really in love, he can't help looking like a sheep. Now, whenever that young man looked at you, he looked like a sheep. I take back all I said this morning. It is genuine.

And suddenly, with a terrific shock, with that feeling as of blurring on a cinematograph screen before the picture comes to focus, Hercule Poirot realized that this artificially set scene had a point of reality...

I suppose I saw photos of him in the papers, but I wouldn't recognize my own mother when a press photographer had done with her.