Quotes About Perception

It's kind of spooky sometimes,' a Canadian lawyer said to me one day. 'There you are, in the Kim Do Hotel, it's ninety-three degrees outside, and it's April eighth, and you're listening to a Vietnamese cover version of Jingle Bells.

The quintessential Japanese balance, I thought: to surrender all of yourself to an illusion, and yet somewhere, in some part of yourself, to know all the while that it is an illusion.

There's one problem with California." I wasn't eager to listen, but the sentence had a promising beginning. "It has no understanding of evil.

So much of our lives takes place in our heads - in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation - that sometimes I feel that I can change my life by changing the way I look at it.

When he gives lectures in the West, I heard the Dalai Lama say in Japan, the audience tunes out the minute he starts speaking about ritual and comes to life as soon as he speaks about philosophy; in Japan, the formula is reversed.

To Marcel Duchamp's blithe "There is no solution, because there is no problem," the Japanese visual artist Shigeko Kubota replied, "There is no problem, because there is no solution.

If they can't get to Europe, they'll find their way to a local theme-park Eiffel Tower. Even a place that we write off as "inauthentic," they realize, can arouse emotions that are entirely authentic.

there was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim." He

As it is common to hear now, when one is in love, anything one sees reminds one of that love - our feelings remake the world in a secular equivalent of the faith that sees the hand of God in everything - so I began to find that when one is thinking on a theme, everything seems to reflect on it.

More important than learning to speak Japanese when you come to Japan is learning to speak silence. My neighbors seem most at home with nonverbal cues, with pauses and the exchange of formulae. What is the virtue of speaking Japanese, Lafcadio Hearn noted, if you cannot think in Japanese?

Reality seemed so paltry next to castles—dungeons—in the air.

told Louis one sunlit afternoon that the essence of the Dalai Lama's teaching for non-Buddhists was contained in the line we'd read at school, from Hamlet: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. / The honest thief, the tender murderer, / The superstitious atheist.

L'homme ne s'avise de la réalité que quand il l'a représentée. Et rien, jamais, n'a pu mieux la représenter que le théâtre.

Passivo come un uccello che vede tutto, volando, e si porta in cuore nel volo in cielo la coscienza che non perdona.

Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.

We can find beauty anywhere. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes it needs some commitment on our part. Sometimes it jumps out at us suddenly, other times we come upon it slowly.

Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences

The world is divided into the ordinary and the extraordinary. The problem is deciding which is which.

Since we came to this world we only heard lies. But it's the lies that make it interesting. The truth would devastate us

The title of the work, its place in the collective library, the nature of the person who tells us about it, the atmosphere established in the written or spoken exhange, among many other instances, offer alternatives to the book itself that allow us to talk about ourselves without dwelling upon the work too closely.

there exists around the written world opened by the work a multitude of other possible worlds, which we can complete by means of our images and our words. Denying oneself this work of completion in the name of some hypothetical fidelity to the work is bound to fail: we can indeed reject filling these gaps in a conscious way, but we cannot prevent our unconscious from finishing the work, according to its priorities and those of the era in which it was written.

We might use the term inner library to characterize that set of books . . . around which every personality is constructed, and which then shapes each person's individual relationship to books and to other people. Specific titles figure in these private libraries, but . . . they are primarily composed of fragments of forgotten and imaginary books through which we apprehend the world.

L'auteur n'attend nullement un résumé ou un commentaire argumenté de son livre et il est même préférable que ceux-ci ne lui soient pas donnés, il attend seulement, en préservant la plus grande ambiguïté possible, qu'on lui dise avoir aimé ce qu'il a écrit.