Quotes About Perception

To be is to be perceived

Festinger argued that in reality we usually just find a way to ignore or discount dissonant information.

What we saw in Richard Nixon's face was the panic in his soul. – Richard Goodwin

It is not thoughts or facts that are painful but the feelings that accompany them. Thoughts in and of themselves are painless, but not the feelings that underlie them!

It is not thoughts or facts that are painful but the feelings that accompany them. Thoughts in and of themselves are painless, but not the feelings that underlie them! It is the accumulated pressure of feelings that causes thoughts.

You wouldn't use a hammer to open a can of soup. You can't use the intellect to apprehend spiritual reality.

Childrens ilogic can be an exquisitely structured mistake.

I like everything, I replied, feeling misrepresented and only half amused right back. I don't hate the world. I'm scared of it. There's a difference.

Artists are artists whether they produce or not. None of it requires much more than hanging out.

It was nice to find out, then, that if one is characterologically incapable of not being a total fuckface, science has not shown you will die any sooner . People might just be gladder when you eventually do.

isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all the advertising men who create it?

For most of Western civilization low sexual desire has been considered a goal rather than a problem.

Cellulite and sexual potential are highly correlated.

Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't.

It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. A bow tie announces to the world you can no longer get an erection.

What's the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I'll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard.

It is funny the things that run through your mind when you're sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers.

Often I'd take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face.

It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.

May I bring you a drink to go with those warm nuts, Mr. Sedaris? this woman looking after me asked - this as the people in coach were still boarding. The looks they gave me as they passed were the looks I give when the door of a limousine opens. You always expect to see a movie star, or, at the very least, some better dressed than you, but time and time again it's just a sloppy nobody. Thus the look, which translates to, Fuck you, Sloppy Nobody, for making me turn my head.

I've become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It's not Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece but Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!

In Japanese and Italian, the response to [How are you?] is I'm fine, and you? In German it's answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by Not so good.