Quotes About Perception

I've found that people's generalizations are largely illuminating about themselves.

It was peculiar how the more you got to know someone, the more you grew to appreciate how little you knew, how little you had ever known- as if progressive intimacy didn't involve becoming more perceptive, but growing only more perfectly ignorant.

Slapping his shoulder was probably a mistake; he flinched. And for the briefest of moments I appreciated what little access we ever had to what really went on in Kevin's head, since for a second the mask fell, and his face curdled with - well, with revulsion, I'm afraid. To allow even so brief a glimpse of its workings, he must have had other things on his mind.

Sometimes I feel it right under my ribs. In my throat. Under my breastbone. It moves around. Sometimes it lodges in my lower back, and I slump in my chair. It's an ache. It feels a little bit like having a mobile tumor or blood clot or kidney stone.

She herself was only sixty, though hers was the first generation to append "only" to such a sobering milestone.

rills ran deeper—so that if you could compare them to ice cream, it was more to the sort so hard that you couldn't ram a spoon into the carton.

Because all value is subjective, money is worth what people feel it's worth. They accept it in exchange for goods and services because they have faith in it.

There's something especially terrible about being told over and over that you have the most wonderful life on earth and it doesn't get any better and it's still shit.

This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen. When I walk down the street, my experience is of looking. Manifest to myself in the ethereal privacy of my head, I grow alarmed when presented with evidence of my public body.

Money is worth what people feel it's worth. . . . Without millions of individual citizens believing in a currency, money is colored paper.

Money is emotional," Lowell pronounced. "Because all value is subjective, money is worth what people feel it's worth.

I was suffering from the delusion that it's the thought that counts.

There is a tendency for humans to consciously see what they wish to see. They literally have difficulty seeing things with negative connotations while seeing with increasing ease items that are positive. For example, words that evoke anxiety, either because of an individual's personal history or because of experimental manipulation, require greater illumination before first being perceived.

The poet... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood

By most people the 'sense of reality' is understood to be the submission to events and indeed illusion is often salvation.

Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.

A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.

Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.

Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.

The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.

Still, I look down, and the grass is so green, I cannot understand how it does not wither and die with sorrow. ~Song of the Sparrow

There is a look in his eye, a heavy look that makes him seem older, as though in one night he has lived one hundred lifetimes. And it makes him appear even more handsome.

And I am so dull and dirty. Like a small brown toad. He does not see me. How could he see me, when she is before him? Glowing and gilded in gold.