Quotes About Perception

Gall 3rst had this idea as a young boy when he noticed that those of his classmates who excelled at memorizing school assignments had prominent eyes.

We discovered that the scrupulously strict were correspondently keen to discern suggestions of sex where nobody else would think of looking for them.

When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is really there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again. from Coleridge: Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread

each generation has to create the image of God that works for it.

A symbol can be defined as an object or a notion that we can perceive with our senses or grasp with our minds but in which we see something other than itself. Reason alone will not enable us to perceive the special, the universal or the eternal in a particular, temporal object. That is the task of the creative imagination, to which mystics, like artists, attribute their insights.

As one Rabbi put it, "God does not come to man oppressively but commensurately with a man's power of receiving him."82 This very important rabbinic insight meant that God could not be described in a formula as though he were the same for everybody: he was an essentially subjective experience. Each individual would experience the reality of "God" in a different way to answer the needs of his or her own particular temperament.

The great genius of the Shiah was its tragic perception that it is impossible fully to implement the ideals of religion in the inescapably violent realm of politics.

It seems that when human beings contemplate the absolute, they have very similar ideas and experiences. The sense of presence, ecstasy and dread in the presence of a reality—called nirvana, the One, Brahman or God—seems to be a state of mind and a perception that are natural and endlessly sought by human beings.

In fact Hell seemed a more potent reality than God, because it was something that I could grasp imaginatively.

There is always a moment in warfare when the horrifying reality breaks through the glamour.

A veil was, as it were, suddenly stripped away from a reality that had been there all the time, but which we had not seen before.

our version of the same event is also likely to be a reflection upon our own situation and suffering rather than a dispassionate and wholly factual account. We

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) distinguished between a problem, "something met which bars my passage" and "is before me in its entirety," and a mystery, "something in which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is not before me in its entirety."69

Why do you observe the splinter in your brother's eye and never notice the plank in your own?

Men and women have formulated this perception of sacred space in different ways over the centuries, but in their discussion of the special status of a city such as Jerusalem certain themes tend to recur, indicating that they speak to some fundamental human need.

To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of all true religiousness.

we rarely convey our thoughts adequately to others and this makes our relationships with other people problematic.

As the Daoists pointed out, we often identify with our ideas so strongly that we feel personally assaulted if these are criticized or corrected.

Enmity shapes our consciousness and identity.

True listening means more than simply hearing the words that are spoken. We have to become alert to the underlying message too and hear what is not uttered aloud. Angry

What if we were to acknowledge that the nature of materiality itself, not merely the materiality of human embodiment, always already entails "an exposure to the Other"?

In a world of fools, I was, I think, to him one of the greater fools.

The young (Somali) women were very inquisitive as to European customs, and listened attentively to descriptions of the manners, education, and clothes of white ladies, as if out to complete their strategic education with the knowledge of how the males of an alien race were conquered and subdued.

Where, My Lord, is music bred—upon the instrument or within the ear that listens? The loveliness of woman is created in the eye of man.