Quotes About Perception

What matters most on your journey is how deeply you see, how attentively you hear, how richly the encounters are felt in your heart and soul.

The wandering French essayist Jacques Reda reminds himself before he leaves his Paris apartment every Sunday morning for his long strolls around the city to see one new thing. . . . he has learned to notice what others ignore.

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it. ROALD DAHL

To be successful at basketball, as author John McPhee once pointed out, you need to have a finely tuned sense of where you are and what's happening around you at any given moment.

Books are like truth serum. If you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.

It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously," Daniel Kahneman noted, "but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

Ignoring the vices of our friends and the virtues of our enemies sets us up for nasty surprises.

This is what fascinates me most: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.

There's danger in thinking joy is a matter of location. If we can't find joy where we are, we probably won't find it anywhere.

When we're young, we think we know all there is to know. Then we grow older, and the more we learn, the more we realize how little we actually know. It takes a wise man to realize just how much he doesn't know.

There is a moral sturdiness to (hardware store owner) Charley that isn't advertised or boasted about, but is obvious to all who know him and quickly discerned by those who don't. Our country has lately been afflicted with television preachers and pundits who focus on our families while neglecting theirs. How vainglorious these critics seem, how vacuous and shallow they appear when placed alongside a man of Charley's stature.

When we're young, we think we know all there is to know. Then we grow older, and the more we learn, the more we realize how little we actually know.

dolphins are not the benevolent mammals we'd like them to be; those beaming faces hide the minds of assassins.

You assume you know your home. It's only when you return that you realise how strange it is.

The Manchester Guardian noted: 'People do not understand this legalistic attitude to affairs of life and death.

Se o viciado é o último a saber que é um viciado, então talvez o homem seja o último a saber que está de fato dizendo o que ele próprio diz. - O homem duplo

So I go to college and I'm standing there looking in the microscope. And there aren't even any paramecia in there at all, 'cause the slide moved. And the instruction is, 'Draw what you see.' And I realize that there's nothing there, nothing at all. But I can't consciously face the fact that this is a symbol of my whole projected four years there, I'm drawing pictures of things that -

A brand-new tape recorder, completely worn out. Bought with funny money that the store is willing to accept. Worthless money, worthless article purchased; it has a sort of logic to it.

the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.

maybe I have got to the point when I see something in everything, because I want to see something. The next thing, he thought, is voices. I'll start hearing voices. What can I count on? What can I believe?

You invent it, he thought to himself. And then you maintain it until it's true.

There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.

It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.

So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.