Quotes About Perception

What we see will violate what we know unless what we know dictates what we see.

Enlightened literally means "to shed light upon.

What we see will violate what we know unless what we know dictates what we see. Bob

To the thinker, the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which, like Homer's chain, extend, link after link, from earth to heaven.

Truth makes on the surface of nature no one track of light -- every eye looking on finds its own.

When the world has once got hold of a lie, it is astonishing how hard it is to get it out of the world. You beat it about the head, till it seems to have given up the ghost, and lo! the next day it is as healthy as ever.

If this is dying, then I don't think much of it.

I'll stick with gin. Champagne is just ginger ale that knows somebody.

Durant les longues nuits et les longues journées passées sous l'effet de la cocaïne dans la chambre de Yag, il me vint à l'esprit que ce qui importe à l'homme ce ne sont pas les événements survenus dans sa vie, mais seulement les répercussions de ces événements dans sa conscience.... ...L'homme vit donc non des événements du monde qui l'entoure mais des reflets de ces événements dans sa conscience.

En ese estado febril, en el que otro, quizás, habría escrito versos, miraba atentamente los ojos de las mujeres con las que me cruzaba, esperando como respuesta esa misma mirada amplia y terrible. Nunca me acercaba a las mujeres que me contestaban con una sonrisa, pues sabía que a una mirada como la mía sólo podía contestar con una sonrisa una prostituta o una virgen.

In the silence, whether we listen to the creation around us, the words of revelation, or the deepest stirrings of our own hearts, we begin to perceive another voice, one that is too often lost in the static of life. It is no use saying: "Speak, Lord, your servant wants to hear," if We never risk the silence to listen. 48

Originality is merely an illusion.

My work is a game, a very serious game.

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

if we let it speak to us rather than squeezing it into our self-created mold. Even God can be known truly, though not absolutely.[54] As Athanasius observed, God can be apprehended but not comprehended;

Perception of a state is not the state.

After all why should our goal be the reinstatement of an illusory 'exact' relationship between events and words? If you probe in the ashes you will never learn anything about the fire: by the time the ashes can be handled the meaning has passed on. Every adventure is a cup so empty it can be drunk from again and again and again. Every adventure is so perfect it verges on silence.

The point was that you have to look at the world as it is, not as some elegant theory says it ought to be.

I see dead people.

When you say 'fear of the unknown', that is the definition of fear fear is the unknown, fear is what you do not know, and it's genetically within us so that we feel safe. We feel scared of the woods because we're not familiar with it, and that keeps you safe.

All life is death. You don't fool yourself about this anymore. You slash at the perfect canvas with strokes of paint and replace the perfect picture of your imagination with the reality of what you are capable of. From death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create. This is what it means, you finally realize, to be alive. ("The Chambered Fruit")

Wasn't that the terrible lesson of her life? Who can ever really know anyone?

It's hard enough to be taken seriously in the struggle for gay rights without having a bunch of straight girls running around kissing each other to get the attention of boys and videocameras.