Quotes About Perception

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that's a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Darkness, you know, is relative.

Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions.

a witness is defined through what he sees, not what he says. And just because you keep something a secret doesn't mean it never happened, no matter how much you want that to be true.

You're lying," he said-not angry, not accusing. Just as if he was stating the facts, in a way that she wasn't. "I am not-" "You can say it a million times, but that doesn't make it any more true." Peter smiled then, so guileless that Lacy felt it smart like a stripe from a whip. "You might be able to fool Dad, and the cops, and anyone else who'll listen," he said. "You just can't fool another liar.

when you're a point, all you see is the point. When you're a line, all you see is the line and the point. When you're in three dimensions, you see three dimensions and lines and points. Just because we can't see a fourth dimensions doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just me ands we haven't reached it yet.

We don't know what reality is," Rayanne says. "We just pretend we do, because it makes us feel like we're in control.

I've always thought elephants walk as if they have music being piped into their heads that no one else can hear. And from the roll of their hips and their swagger, I'm going to guess that the artist is Barry White.

Pick ten strangers and stick them in a room, and ask them which of us they feel sorrier for - you or me - and we all know who they'll choose.

Sometimes we don't know we're dreaming; we can't even fathom that we're asleep.

Only the liar knows that he's lying.

I also mistakenly believed that the scariest stories came from imagination, not real life.

True, I'd never met him. And true, he was a fictional character. But he also was what people needed him to be: a dashing hero, and articulate peacemaker, a cunning excape artist.

It is amazing how you can look in a mirror your whole life and think you are seeing yourself clearly. And then one day, you peel off a filmy gray layer of hypocrisy, and you realize you've never truly seen yourself at all. I

On one side of the seesaw is my education. My nursing certification. My twenty years of service at the hospital. My neat little home. My spotless RAV4. My National Honor Society-inductee son. All of these building blocks of my existence, and yet the only quality straddling the other side is so hulking and dense that it tips the balance every time: my brown skin.

but I used to think, Josef says quietly, that there are some weeds that are just as beautiful as flowers. (pg 134)

But memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

I used to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn't tell. I mean, I was just me. Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did. That was the day I started to believe they might be right.

You have a choice. You can just go on the facts and form your own opinions. Or you can hold the truth in your hands, and see it for the gift it is.

Eli had learned long ago that you can stare right at something and not see what lies beneath the surface.

Don't say it. Don't say nobody's going to stare at me, because they will. Don't tell me it doesn't matter because it does. And don't tell me I look fine because that's a lie. I'm a freak, Mom. Look at me.