Quotes About Perception

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.

Every man carries within him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow. A parlor game for a wet afternoon – imaging the mirrors of one's friends. A has a huge pier glass, gilded and baroque, B a discreet little pocket mirror in a pigskin case with his initials stamped on the back; whenever one looks at C, he is in the act of throwing his mirror away but, if one looks in his pocket or up his sleeve, one always finds another, like an extra ace.

But round your image there is no fog, and the Earth can still astonish.

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

Precocious children rarely grow up good). My aunts and uncles thought me quite atrocious. For using words more adult than I should

Any society is in danger of dismissing the virtue of another society because of its vices, and a democracy is always in danger of not paying enough attention to manners and forms.

When a reviewer describes a book as 'sincere,' one knows immediately that it is a) insincere (insincerely insincere) and b) badly written.

And how reliable can any truth be that is got By observing oneself and then just inserting a Not?

O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed

He has never seen God, but, once or twice, he believes he has heard Him.

A poet […] may talk nonsense, but it will probably be interesting nonsense.

Nobody would call Miss Democracy anything but a plain girl, but when one compares her with the hags to whom millions are expected to pay court, she seems a very Helen.

As mile by mile is seen No trespasser's reproach, And love's best glasses reach No fields but are his own.

Dear little not-so-innocents, beware of Old Grandmother Spider: rump her endearments – She's not quite as nice as She looks, nor you quite as tough as you think.

My name on the title-page seems a pseudonym for someone else, someone talented but near the border of sanity...

The songs celebrates the order of the nature. When the scene is nice, the emotion are nasty, when the scene is nasty, the emotion are nice.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

Look into my eyes, and you will see me there--all, all that is in my heart.' 'Oh, I know what I should see there!'...'What would you see? Tell me?' 'There is a little black ball in the middle of your eye; I should see myself in it no bigger than that,' and she marked off about an eighth of her little finger-nail. 'There is a pool in the wood, and I look down and see myself there. That is better. Just as large as I am--not small and black like a small, small fly.

It is best for a man to try to be both poet and naturalist — not to be too much of a naturalist and so overlook the beauty of things, or too much of a poet and so fail to understand them or even perceive those hidden beauties only revealed by close observation.

Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear.

Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples' lives for them.

Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples' lives for them. I don't write autobiography.

Gilbert's response to being told they (the words 'ruddy' and 'bloody') meant the same thing was: "Not at all, for that would mean that if I said that I admired your ruddy countenance, which I do, I would be saying that I liked your bloody cheek, which I don't.