Quotes About Perception

She has a Billy goat brain and a mockingbird mouth!

This is why aliens won't talk to us .

Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos.

You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you ever moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shown you worlds that no other living men have seen?

Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions.

In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call "happiness", if we be but able to entertain them.

Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other.

My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time.

Good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture.

Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.

My! ain't men blinder'n moles?

Tell me, Was Venus more beautiful Than you are, When she topped The crinkled waves, Drifting shoreward On her plaited shell? Was Botticelli?s vision Fairer than mine; And were the painted rosebuds He tossed his lady Of better worth Than the words I blow about you To cover your too great loveliness As with a gauze Of misted silver?

It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.

Two meanings have our lightest fantasies -- One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.

Fools, when their roof-tree falls, think it doomsday.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.

Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.

Past and present commingle: Eternity in the single blink of an eye!

Tea tempers the spirits and harmonizes the mind, dispels lassitude and relieves fatigue, awakens thought and prevents drowsiness, lightens or refreshes the body, and clears the perceptive faculties.

We think we've seen it all before, we think we know it all by heart.

We must be careful what we read, and not, like the sailors of Ulysses, take bags of wind for sacks of treasure.

Everyone recognizes reality (or recognizes what, in their experience, clearly pertains to reality) only because others designate it to them as such. Reality suffers from a species of inherent fragility, such that the reality of reality must incessantly be reinforced in order to endure.

The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.