Quotes About Perception

If we look and listen a little more carefully, we can release ourselves from the constraints of predetermined judgment, and open ourselves up to expanded awareness of multiple coexisting harmonious meanings.

To me, real humor is very serious. Mark Twain's humor in Huckleberry Finn is funny, but it's about very serious things. It's a deeper, richer laugh for me.

I felt that the world itself had changed and that it would never be steady under my feet again. I felt I understood nothing of people and had no way to learn. I felt fear. Until you have felt fear, you cannot imagine it. Once you have really felt it, you know that all your earlier nervousness was but a pale shadow.

He knew from the first that this man would know how to hurt him.

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent; it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.

In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable.

We fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noises.

It is seldom that any judge really gets to the bottom of a case. The well of truth is usually too deep for the merely judicial plumb-line.

You know, sir," he said, "she was easily the nicest woman I ever knew." Sampson suppressed a smile. It was funny to hear a boy of seventeen talk like that. All the same, he reflected, the lad might live to seventy and still find no reason to change his opinion.

The English," said MacWilliam, a trace of Highland accent appearing for once in his speech, "are not by and large an educated people.

She spent a great deal of her time in an endeavour, becoming yearly more and more difficult in a world increasingly disturbed, to "place" people properly, and she was obviously overjoyed that in this case the task had been so easy, and the result so satisfactory.

Surely we are all mad people, and they Whom we think are, are not;

I mostly believe, deep in my bones, that life is very simply beyond description; regardless of what one makes of it, life always spills over the parameters of how anyone has chosen to define it.

Names are what you can hear or see, but cannot smell or touch. I don't need a name, as name stand for things they are not, and I am what all names stand for. If you gave me a name, it would mean that we are separate, you and I, when we are not. - The Blind Girl and the Talking Moon

And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil, Only beauty will call to them and save them So that they will know how to say: this is true and that is false.

It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.

She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

When, after a long life, it falls out That he takes on a form he had sought And every word carved in stone Grows its hoarfrost, what then? Torches Of Dionysian choruses in the dark mountains From when he comes. And half of the sky With its snaky clouds. A mirror before him. In the mirror the already severed, perishing Thing.

And who can consent at the mirror to a mere face of man?

If I had to tell what the world is for me I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole and place him in a theatre seat one evening and, bringing my ear close to his humid snout, would listen to what he says about the spotlights, sounds of the music, and movements of the dance.

I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A river, suffering because reflections of clouds and tress and not clouds and trees.