Quotes About Perception

That's the great question: Who sees the miracles of daily life? And the answer is: Whoever chooses to see.

If a married individual thought as negatively about his or her spouse as the American Left does about America, we would find that individual's proclamations of deep love for the spouse difficult to believe.

But we pay a price for everyone's putting on a happy face—we start believing that life for everyone else is great. I wonder what effect

Most people believe that happiness and fun are virtually identical. Ask them, for example, to imagine a scene of happy people. Most people immediately conjure up a picture of people having fun (e.g. laughing, playing games, drinking at a party). Few people imagine a couple raising children, a couple married thirty years, someone reading a great book, or people doing any of the other things that really do bring happiness.

People greatly value knowledge and intelligence, but not wisdom.

We have become so brainwashed by the fast, usually bloodless, and always painless deaths shown continually by the movie and television production industry that our collective perceptions of the act of death are sanitized. Whether by gunshot or through illness, the actor just rolls over and that's the end. We want so much to believe that this is true that we don't question it.

You can always use intuition and observation to bring out the truth.

What am I more than elaborate sentience?

the fact that she completely obscured his view of the road was quite irrelevant since Asian drivers never look where they're going.

I never can understand why most people imagine a bed – some sort of bed: any sort of bed – to be a prerequisite of sleep.

The way to understand any enemy is to realize that, from his perspective, he is not a villain but a hero.

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets,unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

Any woman who doesn't have a little bit of whore in her is pretty much a dried up stick.

He realizes finally that the boy he's been watching snap his board into the air, then neatly touch down- long, black, gleaming hair, pale white skin- is Felice. He didn't know she'd learned how to skateboard. He's never seen her like this before- so intently focused and content- her beauty beside the point, merely part of the catalog of effects- speed, balance, daring. He admires her athletic form and feels moved in some unexpected way.

Flour and yolk and cream are all coarse- of the earth. But sugar and air and vanilla are elements of the firmament. Avis used to tell her kids: Sweets should be an evanescence, cakes and pies represent minutes, cookies and milles-feuilles are seconds, meringues are moments.

He's a Muslim , you know. Um-Nadia's voice is half-warning and half-laughter. Dark as an Egyptian. Ma! Mirielle shouts. Get a grip. Um-Nadia's grinning like it's one of her old jokes. And here is our beautiful Sirine, whiter than this. She takes a bite out of a whole peeled onion as if it were an apple.

She takes a bite of the custardy penne cotta and it melts into a dozen separate flavors. She can smell oranges and lemons, cherry and wood, and even the soft silk and wool of Persian carpets, the smell that she thought came from Iraq.

Lying on the floor, with the carved panels of the ceiling flickering dimly above, I found myself thinking that I had always heretofore assumed that the tendency of eigh­teenth-century ladies to swoon was due to tight stays; now I rather thought it might be due to the idiocy of eighteenth-century men.

An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time

The most irritating thing about cliches, I decided, was how frequently they were true.

Time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is-in the blink of an eye, a mother can see the child again as they were when they were born, when they learned how to walk, as they were at any age-at any time, even when the child is fully grown or a parent themselves.

Well I am still not drunk I straightened up against the pillows as best I could. You told me once that if you could still stand up, you weren't drunk. You aren't standing up. he point out. You are.

He was dead. However, his nose throbbed painfully, which he thought odd in the circumstances.