Quotes About Perception

You can't understand anything unless you unless you understand everything.

Among the languages of American Indians there is no word for 'art,' because for Indians everything is art.

The disciples of Jesus "found themselves thinking that if divine goodness were to manifest itself in human form, this (he) is how it would behave… he invited people to see differently instead of telling them what to do or believe…he located the authority of his teaching in his hearer's hearts, not in himself or God-as-removed.

Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.

People look at you a certain way and somehow you wind up being that way.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.

Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you're told you deserve whatever you get.

One should never mistake pattern for meaning.

I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.

Now to think of concrete as both natural and artificial demands a greater degree of mental agility than most of us can manage. So much is invested in the absoluteness of this distinction between natural and artificial , so necessary is it to our whole cosmology, that to admit that something can be both of these would be just too anxious-inducing. To avoid this, we habitually operate on the assumption that concrete is just artificial, or alternatively, just natural, but never both.

If you look at the footballers, you look at our celebrity culture, we seem to be saying, 'This is the way you want to be'. We seem to be a society that celebrates all the wrong people.

When the news is good, the BBC view is: 'Get the government out of the picture quickly, don't allow them to say anything about it.' When the news is bad: 'Let's all dump on the government.'

If an Aztec and a Roman were transported to the twenty-first century the Aztec might be the less mystified. He would know why people were smoking.

A universal weakness of humanity is to equate the strength of an argument with their opinion of its maker.

Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.

Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.

The true answer to seduction is to open people's eyes to the shallowness of the "beauty" on offer. The

We are quick to stand up for our own rights and reputation and eager for everyone to think well of us. At the same time, we are slow, very slow, to put ourselves out for the sake of others or for the sake of God's reputation. We'd much rather hear God's name taken in vain than our own.

Light is all memory.

The line of traffic advancing towards the rising sun looked like a procession of the returning dead. Every one of them, solitaries in clean shirts, smoking, checking mirrors to see if their reflections were still there, wore dark glasses.

You can be so much in a room that the world outside turns to water. You've got the heater blowing out burnt air, but you still don't get warm. Your ankles are singed, but your head's in a bucket of ice. Time drips like a stalactite. The water for the coffee boils away in a tree of steam.

Atkins knows two kinds of birds: seagulls and the ones that aren't seagulls.

The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann once observed that the simple act of asking yourself, "Where did I put my keys?" performs unexpected magic: it transforms the world into a catalog of possible key locations.1 Under the couch, somewhere the dog or the baby moved