Quotes About Perception

There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting... But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.

Science doesn't have all the answers, but it is good at spotting the important questions when they are camouflaged against a background of common sense.

We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious.

Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it!

The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not subtract from its wonder.

Perhaps, then, the words male and female have no general meaning.

Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 'When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world

one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.

There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness, which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence.

No sane creator, setting out from scratch to design a flat-fish, would have conceived on his drawing board the absurd distortion of the head needed to bring both eyes round to one side.

Once again, I am sorry to take a sledgehammer to so small and fragile a nut, but I have to do so because more than 40 per cent of the American people believe literally in the story of Noah's Ark.

As Arthur C. Clarke put it, in his Third Law: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' The miracles wrought by our technology would have seemed to the ancients no less remarkable than the tales of Moses parting the waters, or Jesus walking upon them.

I am inclined to follow Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 'When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.

we're apt to forget that symmetry is not an obvious quality that every creature must have.

What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.

As for the next nearest star, Proxima Centauri, if you look at it in 2012, what you are seeing is happening in 2008.

that childlike inability to distinguish what is true from what we'd like to be true.

You say you have experienced God directly? Well, some people have experienced a pink elephant, but that probably doesn't impress you.

I, like you, see through all the smoke and mirrors, but come on, guys, think of the poor dears who can't handle the truth!

What is the colour of abstraction? What is the smell of hope?

Is there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside our thought?

Constructing models is something the human brain is very good at. When we are asleep it is called dreaming; when we are awake we call it imagination or, when it is exceptionally vivid, hallucination.

Careful inference can be more reliable than 'actual observation', however strongly our intuition protests at admitting it.