Quotes About Perception

To generations of the willfully blind, true beauty can remain unseen in plain sight, but beauty sooner or later asserts itself—always, always, always—and is at last recognized, because there's so damn little of it.

pity very often—not always—comes with an unspoken and sometimes unrecognized element of contempt.

I had come to believe that her powers, whatever their nature, were greater than mine. But now I was chagrined to realize that I had failed to grasp how we were in at least one way alike: Some things visible to us were invisible to the vast majority of human beings, even if perhaps each of us saw different things from what the other perceived.

The dead don't talk. Perhaps they know things about death that the living are not permitted to learn from them.

she sees through yoy and knowsyour truest heart, but loves you anyway, [...]

The more familiar that a place becomes, the more mysterious it becomes, as well, if you are alert to the truth of things. I have found this to be the case all of my life.

Maybe the difference between horror and holiday was just the width of an ordinary street.

news is never all the news, only what they want to show you

I took comfort that its IQ, while no doubt high enough to allow it to run for elective office, seemed to be only a fraction of mine.

The stairs creaked. They always creaked when creaking could lead to your death, and they never creaked when creaking didn't matter. The universe is anthropic, meaning that its design makes possible and sustains intelligent life, especially human beings. Nevertheless, I perceive some power, some presence, some adversary behind the scenes that by countless devices subtle or blunt seeks to destroy us.

Maybe it's that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don't see what you wish to see—or glimpse something that you wish weren't there.

Fear is the engine that drives the human animal. Humanity sees the world as a place of uncountable threats, and so the world becomes what humanity imagines it to be. They not only live in fear but use fear to control one another. Fearmongering is their true religion.

She was so nice to look at that Joe twice stabbed his left foot when he thought he was spearing a bit of litter, though neither wound was serious enough to require a tetanus shot.

Funny how people that don't believe in nothin' are so quick to believe every crazy story about people like us.

think much about girls. Considering my long, pale face and hound-dog eyes behind black-rimmed glasses with thick lenses, maybe I already knew that even through adulthood

What most people call truth is merely the surface, and under it lies a great depth of truth that they do not perceive.

Truths we don't want to hear always make the teller ugly to us.

But sometimes I knew things with my heart that my mind could not explain.

the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know.

she and I seem to be more alike than not, acutely aware of the strangeness of the world and charmed by it's mysteries.

Much of the world is beautiful, and much more is at least fair to the eye, and what might be ugly is nevertheless of the same texture as everything else and clearly belongs in the tapestry.

Most people unconsciously blind themselves to the true nature of existence, because they fear knowing that this world is a place of mystery and meaning. It's immeasurably easier to live in a world that's all surfaces, that means nothing and demands nothing of you.

Words are plastic these days. Small loans made to desperate people at exorbitant interest rates are called payday advances. A cheesy hotel paired with a seedy casino is called a resort. Any assemblage of frenetic images, bad music, and incoherent plot is called a major motion picture.

But as usual, the common folk are wiser and more able to discern the truth of things than are the elites who claim to serve them.