Quotes About Perception

Only madmen and historians, he said, believe their lies.

Intelligent people, Achamian had found, were typically less happy. The reason for this was simple: they were better able to rationalize their delusions. The ability to stomach Truth had little to do with intelligence—nothing, in fact. The intellect was far better at arguing away truths than at finding them.

He had despised the sorcerer, thinking him one of those mewling souls who forever groaned beneath burdens of their own manufacture.

Conviction, no matter how narcotic its depth, simply did not make true.

He no longer heard Kellhus speak so much as observed him cut and carve, whittle and hew, as though the man had somehow shattered the glass of language and fashioned knives from the pieces.

Almost all men prized the familiar path over the true.

he knew that one never stood still, even while waiting. That sometimes the sheathed knife could cut the most throats of all.

Kings never lie. They demand the world be mistaken. —CONRIYAN PROVERB   When

Where power was perceived, power was given. For his entire life Conphas had been surrounded by tutors.

Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies—words—and so sank or floated with equal ease.

The eyes of men were but pinholes...All their books, even their scriptures, were nothing more than pinholes. And yet, because they couldn't see what was unseen, they assumed they saw everything, they confused pinpricks with the sky.

Sometimes he would stare at the bare trees for so long, they would lose their radial dimensions and seem something flat, like blood smeared into the wrinkles about an old woman's eyes.

Sleep, when deep enough, is indistinguishable from vigilance.

To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things. To be ignorant is to be a slave of the world. To be deceived is to be the slave of another man. The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so? —AJENCIS, THE EPISTEMOLOGIES

If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise.

You realized those truths that cut against the interests of the powerful were called lies, and that those lies that served those interests were called truths.

few things are more familiar, he supposed, than finding oneself a stranger.

Where the holy take men for fools, the mad take the world. —

That's the horrible fact of sinners. We're indistinguishable from the righteous.

To see what was unseen was to understand that blindness was always a matter of degree. To say that all men were blind in some respect—to the machinations of others, to themselves—was a truism scarcely worth noting. What was astounding was the way this truism perpetually escaped Men, the way they confused seeing mere slivers with seeing everything they needed to see.

Have you heard the saying, Skeaös? 'Cats look down upon Man, and dogs look up, but only pigs dare look Man straight in the eye.'" "Y-yes, God-of-Men." "Pretend that you are a pig, Skeaös." What

Where power was perceived, power was given.

to observe a thing always is to observe a thing not at all.

What is the meaning of a deluded life?