Quotes About Perception

Everything about her seems to be saying, Listen, if you don't look attentively, if you don't go beyond my simplicity to detect the simmering volcano in me, you are not it.

Never underestimate a clown with a book.

The visual and the popular are essential.

There is no God, there are only humans who imagine the possibility of gods.

When I was a young writer if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science-fiction writer you would be insulted. They would call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers.

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.

Just because everyone believes something to be true, doesn't make it truth

A critic once characterized baseball as six minutes of action crammed into two-and-one-half hours.

She thought in pictures and feelings, not words.

She did not think policeman—she simply watched and took in images, sounds, sensations.

the light was black. It was not real light, not good light, not the light Lizzie knew, that you could read by or warm to, but a light that was made of darkness, a cancerous light, thick and smothering

The ordinary is immune to understanding because it cannot be placed outside human experience for examination.

So the real answer to any fundamental question is experience itself.

34. Beneath Each Knowing There is mystery because there is not-knowing. Yet beneath each knowing is the next not-knowing. So each knowing deepens the mystery. Yet even in knowing there is the mystery of knowing.

Lucille Ball]'s such a TV icon it's hard for some to separate the two Lucys—the gorgeous, snappy actress of film and the wacky, slapstick queen of television. On TV she was a middle-aged housewife, on film she was a dazzling beauty. The difficulty with her movie career wasn't that she was bad or not up to the roles. Quite the contrary: They were rarely up to her.

If you smell baby diapers in a wine that smells like strawberries to me, that's OK. The winery isn't putting either in the wine.

One man's famine makes another man's feast.

Even by common wisdom, there seem to be both people and objects in my dream that are outside myself, but clearly they were created in myself and are part of me, they are mental constructs in my own brain.

If the mind were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.

If we were magically shrunk and put into someone's brain while she was thinking, we would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe their workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would nowhere contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers! —G. W. LEIBNIZ (1646–1716)

Suppose that there be a machine, the structure of which produces thinking, feeling, and perceiving; imagine this machine enlarged but preserving the same proportions, so you could enter it as if it were a mill. This being supposed, you might visit inside; but what would you observe there? Nothing but parts which push and move each other, and never anything that could explain perception. —Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Hoewel we de illusie hebben dat we beelden met hoge resolutie ontvangen van onze ogen, stuurt de oogzenuw slechts contouren en aanwijzingen over interessante punten in ons blikveld naar het brein. We 'hallucineren' eigenlijk de wereld vanuit ons corticale geheugen.

Dreams are real while they last; can we say more of life? —HAVELOCK ELLIS

Even though we think we see the world so fully, what we are receiving is really just hints