Quotes About Perception

Seems does not make it so.

If it feels like it might be OCD, it is OCD! If it were reality, it wouldn't feel like it even might be OCD.

We are not passive recipients but active participants in our own process of perception (Nancy Kanwisher)

Attending to one sense, such as vision, does not simply kick up the activity in the region of the brain in charge of that sense. It also reduces activity in regions responsible for other senses. If you are really concentrating on the little black lines and curves on this white page, you are less likely to feel someone brush against you, or to hear someone speaking in the background.

The role of observation in quantum physics cannot be emphasized too strongly. In classical physics, observed systems have an existence independent of the mind that observes and probes them. In quantum physics, however, only through an act of observation does a physical quantity come to have an actual value.

What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. —T. H. Key Of

It is wrong," Bohr once said, "to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.

If there is a single fundamental underpinning in the intellectual tradition of Western scientific thought, it is arguably that there exists an unbridgeable divide between the world of mind and the world of matter, between the realm of the material (which is definitely real) and the realm of the immaterial (which, according to the conventions of science, is likely illusory).

Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny, the way monogamy is funny, the way someone falling down in the street is funny. I entered a revolving door and emerged as a human being. When you think of me is my face electronically blurred?

Believing that the world is fair, people fail to note the various land mines in the environment that can undermine their careers.

If I were a lesbian and had a thing for narcissistic ex-sorority girls? I'd totally do me. Bitter is the New Black: Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smart-Ass, or Why You Should Never Carry a Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office: A Memoir

Yeah, I'm over forty, flighty, and fluffy- I'd say I'm not ideal bouncer material.

Can I tell you something about Seattle? Everyone there is a filthy liar. They're all, 'Don't move to Seattle—it's so rainy!' And yet every time I've been there, a tiny amount of rain falls before the whole sky explodes into rainbows and sunlight. Seattleites mean to hog up all the stunning vistas and good coffee and flowering bushes for themselves. Bet on it.

In terms of being smart, Libby is very, very pretty.

1970s, only one in ten women was childfree; today the number is one in five.169 Yet when I mention my choice, I've had moms look at me like I'm defective, or a unicorn, or a defective unicorn. Keep your pity; I don't need it.

Recently, Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks, came out against the term "billionaire," instead preferring to be called "a person of means," as though he's now ashamed of what he's built.

What's funny is that everyone's so appalled by the notion of hitchhiking now, yet it's totes fine if we pay five dollars for the privilege of riding in a stranger's Lyft.

She makes tsk-tsk sounds as she unpacks grocery sacks full of Pop-Tarts, mini chimichangas, and a frozen patty-based product called "Chykyn Wingzz," which I suspect contains neither chicken nor wings. "Kel

Changing standards of the ideal body have pushed Americans to be thinner and strategically curvier, and then thinner again, yet our country continues to get fatter and fatter. The disparity between the ideal and our reality is making most of us twitchy.

They could not make out the exact words coming from their captain's mouth, but it was fairly clear he wasn't reciting poetry.

Somehow, she knew the thought of an apology would never cross his mind. He was fae. In his mind, everything that had transpired was just and reasonable, even if it made no sense to her.

The question of what kind of a thing a text or poem is now becomes a function neither of what the poet might have intended by its words nor of what the conventions of grammar and meaning might seem to require of them, but rather of the reader's irreducibly subjective experience in her encounter with those words.

What I'm asserting is that we are looking at bisexuality the wrong way, making the identity entirely dependent on someone other that the bisexual person him- or herself. If I'm dating a man, I'm straight. If I'm dating a woman, I'm a lesbian. But sexuality is not who you sleep with, it's who you are. It doesn't change according to who is standing next to you.

As it turned out, my perception was so much more intimidating than the reality.