Quotes About Perception

Les gens, continue Lalix, ils se croient des petites merveilles, tout ce qu'ils font, tout ce qu'ils sont. Ils s'attribuent une importance... Alors, s'il fallait, par-dessus, encaisser le récit de leurs rêves, on n'en finirait plus.

T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.

When you're young,' Harry said, 'you just see things. There's nothing much to say about them. You don't realize then all the life that's gone into it.

The visitor sees beauty; the inhabitant a place where he works and has his friends.

For here was the station, by the asylum: both on the outskirts, where the Victorians thought they belonged.

It is easy to time-travel, the physicist says—we do it every day. Travelling backward is the problem.

Reality is infinite and we are finite and so there is a necessary mismatch between our knowledge of the world and the world itself.

He hadn't altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.

The psychoanalyst picks our dreams as if they were our pockets." "The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.

And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world.

we convince ourselves that we're getting affection when we're not. This is common with families and communities where abuse is prevalent. We don't always want to see that our actions (or those of our leaders or family members) are unkind and potentially abusive. We want so badly to be cared for and connected to someone that, rather than facing the pain and fear, we adjust our perception of love to fit the dysfunctional patterns.

by uncovering the illusions and finding the gifts they've masked, we can grow, and begin to feel more love and gratitude for our relatives. This is the true healing process.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't.

billions of women must be out there on this seven-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever.

Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness.

Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or be seen. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then become a story-teller.

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors...disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.

Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.

Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.

After my book Wanderlust came out in 2000, I found myself better able to resist being bullied out of my own perceptions and interpretations. On two occasions around that time, I objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest- in a nutshell, female.

Of course women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive.

Were revolutions ever really that we thought them to be?

Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.