Quotes About Perception

From my academic life, I was used to being in the company of very smart people, but it was apparent from the beginning that this was as smart a bunch of men as I had ever encountered. That first impression never changed (though I was to learn, in the years ahead, the severe limitations of sheer intellect

How do we know that even the realest of realities wouldn't be subjective, in the final analysis? Nobody can prove his existence, can he?

Self-esteem is the difference between where you believe you are and where you think you should be compared to others. If they match, you tend to feel good about yourself. If they don't match, you feel inferior.

Where you bring your attention always determines how you feel.

These people are often so wrapped up in their negative thinking patterns that they sabotage their relationships without realizing it. Whenever you have a distressing thought about your relationship, write it down and ask yourself if it is true. Equally important is asking your loved one to explain what they really mean whenever they say something that you interpret in a negative way.

I have an idea that the phrase "the weaker sex" was coined by some woman to disarm the man she was preparing to overwhelm. —OGDEN NASH

18–40–60 rule. It says that when you are eighteen, you worry about what everyone thinks of you; when you are forty, you don't give a damn what anyone thinks about you; and when you're sixty, you realize no one has been thinking about you at all.

Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know—that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.

Arthritic toothless people who love orgasms are more likely to reproduce than are limber, toothy people who do not.

Studies such as these demonstrate that once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened.

the feeling of control—whether real or illusory—is one of the wellsprings of mental health.

The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what they eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.

When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won't really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later.

This frontal lobe—the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age—is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens.

As soon as our potential experience becomes our actual experience—as soon as we have a stake in its goodness—our brains get busy looking for ways to think about the experience that will allow us to appreciate it.

Our desire to control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable.

the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope.

You may think yellow is a color, but it isn't. It's a psychological state. It is what human beings with working visual apparatus experience when their eyes are struck by light with a wavelength of 580 nanometers.

Surprise tells us that we were expecting something other than what we got, even when we didn't know we were expecting anything at all.

To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine—ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn't and has never been, but as it might be.

Similarly, the cocaine experience is not the kitten-fur experience, which is not the promotion experience, but all are forms of feeling that occupy different points on a scale of happiness.

Who thus define it, say they more or less / Than this, that happiness is happiness?

But as bald men with cheap hairpieces always seem to forget, acting as though you have something and actually having it are not the same thing, and anyone who looks closely can tell the difference.

if you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.