Quotes About Perception

Mom turned to me, puzzled. In sign language, she asked, "What was Grandpa saying in the kitchen?" My heart froze.

I have talked and listened and heard and there is no me!

My father, she insisted, was not born deaf. "Insisted" because there was an even greater stigma attached to genetic deafness (and the family) than there was to acquired deafness.

For so long I'd been doing what I'd accused other people of doing—I was seeing the deafness, not the people.

The notion that the womb is a silent place is pure fantasy. If a person dives under water, he hears very little because sound is muffled by the cushion of air remaining outside the eardrum. A fetus has no air bubble outside its ear, and water conducts sound better than air.

By the age of two, hearing children perceived their parents' deafness well enough to know automatically that they must use gestures with their parents and other deaf people. If the children talked at all, their voices had an unusual quality and they exaggerated their mouth movements. These same children immediately shifted gears, speaking in "normal" voices, with hearing people.

Immediately the stranger would bend over toward me and ask, "Does he lip-read?" as if Dad had suddenly become as inanimate as a cigar store Indian.

there are signs that are parodies of actual objects and that retain a cleverness even for deaf people. Indeed, these signs are to sight what onomatopoeia is to sound.

That was another thing hearing people did—made too-large movements. It was tantamount to shouting.)

You're never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

The problem with having a sense of humor is often that people you use it on aren't in a very good mood.

Showing a photograph of a brain lit-up in a certain way, and claiming that this "explains" samadhi, is like showing a picture of a tree lit-up in a certain way, and claiming that this "explains" Christmas.

People looking to take offense will always find something to take it at, but then they're the ones with the problem.

How can anybody learn anything from an artwork when the piece of art only reflects the vanity of the artist and not reality?

You do this because you like it, you think what you're making is beautiful. And if you think it's beautiful, maybe they think it's beautiful.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

When you think the night has seen your mind, That inside you're twisted and unkind, Let me stand to show that you are blind. Please put down you hands 'cause I see you. I'll be you mirror, reflect what you are. I'll Be Your Mirror

I'll be your mirror, Reflect what you are, In case you don't know. I'll Be Your Mirror

He thinks if he tells us for hundred times a day that he went to Stanford University, then we'll appreciate what a big sacrifice he's making to be a teacher who gets paid crap.

The Enemy masterfully paints an inviting picture of freedom.

eye at the end of each arm. But the starfish doesn't have an actual brain to tell it what it's seeing. Instead, nerves run from its mouth to each of its eyes, and sensors in its many tubelike "feet" actually find food. So the starfish is perfectly able to move and eat and do all that it needs to live, but it can't think. The starfish can't "see" what path it should take—it just goes where its body tells it to go.

Evil people do tend to think they're the heroes of their own stories,

Actually, if truth be told, love and unselfishness are also received in a radically different way by the object of the proffered charity.  In the former case, the recipient is assured that another human being cares deeply about him; in the latter, he feel manipulated and used.

Lewis closes his book, The Abolition of Man, with these prophetic words: "You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. . . . If you see through everything, then everything is transparent.  But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world.  To see through all things is the same as not to see."