Quotes About Perception

Nothing is just anything.

She was learning that if she pretended to be weak and frightened, and dabbed at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief, she could turn aside all manner of pressing questions.

Whenever you turn your head, your deaths dodge behind you. Wherever you look, they hide. They hide in a teacup. Or in a dewdrop. Or in a breath of wind.

Does he think the job of a librarian is so simple, so empty of content, that anyone can step up and do it for a thank-you and a cup of tea? Does he think that all a librarian does is to tidy the shelves?

How can the weather have a state of mind?" said Papadimitriou. The gyptian said, "You think the weather is only out there? It's in here too," and tapped his head. "So do you mean that the weather's state of mind is just our state of mind?" "Nothing is just anything," the gyptian replied, and would say no more.

In some lights they were hardly there at all, just visible as a drifting quality in the light, a rhythmic evanescence, like veils of transparency turning before a mirror.

Everything means something, Lyra said severely. We just have to find out how to read it.

She was afraid of her father, and she admired him profoundly, and she thought he was stark mad; but who was she to judge?

Was there only one world after all, which spent its time dreaming of others?

They were all looking at Mary, and she felt more than ever like the new pupil at a school where they had high expectations of her. She also felt a strange flattery: the idea of herself as swift and darting and birdlike was new and pleasant, because she had always thought of herself as dogged and plodding. But along with that came the feeling that they'd got it terribly wrong, if they saw her like that; they didn't understand at all; she couldn't possibly fulfill this desperate hope of theirs.

How do you do that? By not being human, he said. That's why you could never trick a bear. We see tricks and deceit as plain as arms and legs. We can see in a way humans have forgotten. But you know about this; you can understand the symbol reader.

The trouble with kind people is they're not sexy.

Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the

Instead, we should delicately and subtly undermine the idea that truth and facts are possible in the first place. Once the people have become doubtful about the truth of anything, all kinds of things will be open to us.

mr. makepeace, do you really turn lead into gold? no, of course not. no one can do that. but if people think you're foolish enough to try, they don't bother to look at what you're really doing. they leave you in peace.

Everything means something," Lyra said severely. "We just have to find out how to read it.

there are few natural philosophers as frustrated as astronomers in a fog.

Existem muitas coisas no mundo que ainda não aprendemos a ler.

this is a different kind of knowing.… It's like understanding, I suppose.…

When you stopped believing in God," he went on, "did you stop believing in good and evil?" "No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels." "Yes

nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.

Vielleicht tun wir manchmal nicht das Richtige, weil das Falsche uns gefährlicher erscheint. Wir wollen aber nicht, dass jemand denken könnte, wir hätten Angst. Deshalb tun wir das Falsche, nur weil es gefährlich ist. Uns ist es wichtiger, furchtlos zu erscheinen, als richtig zu urteilen.

She'd hardly been aware of feeling anxious, but that was because anxiety was everywhere, built into the very molecules of the world, or so it had seemed.

maybe from other experiences as well, that there are more ways than one, more than two, of seeing things and perceiving their meanings.