Quotes About Perception

Everything, he decided, was almost unbearably sad. Life was wonderful, but nobody seemed to know what to do with it, and the world was beautiful, but nobody looked at it except tourists.

That's the trouble with witnesses. They always look at the wrong things.

Yet he worked unceasingly, amassing a considerable fortune in the process, at turning clients who were indubitably criminals loose upon society. He always assumed that the words from a witness' mouth were perjury, unless he had put them there himself. He expected his friends eventually to double-cross him, and was neither surprised nor hurt when they occasionally did. Yet this did not interfere in the least with his very sincere liking for them.

Mother looked really wolfbait in rose.

Some concepts are alien to the Glaswegian mind. Salad. Dentistry. Forgiveness.

You need to understand that truth is stranger than fiction. Listen: people are willing to swallow any old tripe as long as you say it without flinching. They want to be told stuff. And they don't want to doubt you either. It's too hard.

With things like this, when people don't really understand what has happened, they'll assume the worst long before they have to. It's a little like when people are afraid of the dark. Often it's not the darkness they're afraid of, it's the fact that they don't know what's in it. And because they can't see, because they're not sure, they start to imagine there are more sinister things afoot than there ordinarily would be.

See, most people you meet, they'll talk to you through fifty layers of gauze and tinting. Sometimes you know they're lying even before they've started speaking. And it seems the older they get, the more brazen and desperate folks become, and they lie about things that don't even matter... I don't know. Maybe they just get so used to it they don't even notice. Maybe it's like a creeping curse and the more you do it, the easier it gets. What's amazing is that they think they're fooling anybody.

And it happens like that. Like when you first realise that there is no such thing as magic.

See, everyone here's afraid of something and nuthin. This town, that's how they live, and they don't even know it. They stick to what they know, what they bin told. They don't unnerstand that it's just a choice you make.

It's better to shut up and appear stupid than open your mouth and remove all doubt.

A tree doesn't know it's a tree. It doesn't know how pretty its flowers are, or how beautiful they smell, or how soft and sweet its fruit is. It can't feel how warm I am with my arms around it. It can't hear me when I tell it these things. It doesn't know anything. I'm glad you're not a tree.

and it's right on the spot. In fact, it

We never fooled around much, even though she was older. She was strange about that stuff. But I never cared really. its not why I brang her here anyways.

To stop expecting other people to behave like we do is actually a two-step process: first we have to realize that we have this expectation, and second we have to start expecting the local people to simply be themselves. The first step, realizing we expect others to be like us, is in many ways the most difficult, for it requires that we somehow become aware of behavior that is completely subconscious.

Because of our cultural conditioning, we not only think our actions are normal, the way everyone behaves; we also think what we do is right, the way everyone should behave. We therefore regard any behavior that is different from ours as wrong. Naturally, this puts cultural incidents into a whole new light.

You have no idea, in short, that what is normal to you is not also universal, that much of what you think of as human nature is only cultural.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer cleverly made this point in 1819: "A person of talent hits a target that no one else can hit; a person of genius hits a target that no one else can see.

Apposite here is a saying attributed to Einstein: "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

Dr. Samuel Johnson discounted that notion: "Sir, a woman's composing is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.

A recent article in the New York Times, "Google, Tell Me. Is My Son a Genius?," pointed out that parents today are 2.5 times as likely to ask online "Is my son gifted?" than "Is my daughter gifted?" and similarly 2.0 times as likely to inquire "Is my daughter overweight?" as they are for a son.

If the portraitist Chuck Close cannot remember faces, the artist Stephen Wiltshire sees and remembers everything. Wiltshire has an eidetic, or photographic, memory. He can look at a cityscape or scene in London, New York, Rome, Dubai, or Tokyo just once, for twenty minutes or so, and later meticulously replicate what he has seen in every detail.

As Picasso said with his typical oxymoronic wit, "It takes a very long time to become young.

I want to know, have you ever seen rain comin down on a sunny day?