Quotes About Perception

It's dangerous to deal with words. In addition the author risks being flayed and stuffed after death by any little youthful and self-assured doctor of literature.

The subjectivity of human thought wants to be objective, but objectivity presents itself as subjectivity to subjectivity, which fools human thought into believing it is objective.

As has been long observed, men are people, but women are women.

Some day, I must ask him what it's like to be married to someone who, eyes narrowed in thought, peers at him over the tops of sociology articles with titles like "Who Gets the Best Deal from Marriage: Women or Men?" We've had our disagreements, of course. When, for example, are a few dirty cups a symbol of the exertion of male privilege, and when are they merely unwashed dishes?

boys do not pursue mathematical activities at a higher rate than girls do because they are better at mathematics. They do so, at least partially, because they think they are better.

As for cognitive empathy there is, it appears, no shortage of people in the world who can unwittingly offend, misunderstand and steamroller over the delicate signals of others, all while maintaining the self-perception that they are unsurpassedly sensitive to subtle social cues.

In other words, both the descriptive ('women are gentle') and the prescriptive ('women should be gentle') elements of gender stereotypes create a problem for ambitious women. Without any intention of bias, once we have categorised someone as male or female, activated gender stereotypes can then colour our perception. When the qualifications for the job include stereotypically male qualities, this

A member of my family, who shall remain nameless, refers to all newborns as 'blobs'.

There is in fact a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced, they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are the clinically depressed.34

There is in fact a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced, they assign responsibility for success and failure more evenhandedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are the clinically depressed.

It just goes to show. There's ten people in the world and the rest is ghosts and mirrors.

She is a cat," he thought. "That's all she is—a cat!" But that was not how his mind saw her—quick beyond all dreams of speed, sharp, clever, unbelievably graceful, beautiful, wordless and undemanding. Where would he ever find a woman who could compare with her?

People always want to pin yesterday's news on you, as opposed to asking you what you're going to do for the future, what you're doing today.

When the conservative looks upon a democratic movement from below, this (and the exercise of agency) is what he sees: a terrible disturbance in the private life of power.

It's funny I'm in some ways hopelessly masculine, but I don't fish, I don't hunt, I'm not that into sports. I can't fix a car. I think it's my point of view and the way I see the world.

If you didn't want to know things, you didn't have to know them. Things didn't become facts until someone actually spoke them. Until then, you could just go on acting just the way you had been acting and even if you suspected there was something that would change everything, you didn't have to acknowledge it; you didn't have to let it in.

Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge, yet cannot be disregarded by philosophers and psychologists.

I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.

Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

You know a great many things in dreams, often despite the evidence of your eyes. You just know them.

You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way.

A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.

Perhaps there's another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we'd see peering through a keyhole. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.