Quotes About Perception

We need to do a better job of describing the reality we confront.

In Germany, belief that the American president can be counted on to do the right thing shrank from 86 percent under his predecessor to 11 percent under Trump. In France, the fall was from 84 percent to 14; in Japan, 74 to 24; in South Korea, 84 to 17.

Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so. "Falsehood flies," observed Jonathan Swift, "and the truth comes limping after it." McCarthy's career shows how much hysteria a skilled and shameless prevaricator can stir up, especially when he claims to be fighting in a just cause.

Fascist attitudes take hold when there are no social anchors and when the perception grows that everybody lies, steals, and cares only about him- or herself.

Some things have to be believed to be seen.

Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.

I do not know everything; still many things I understand.

Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.

Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.

It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible. Instead of rejoicing in this glorious "impossible" which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds.

He'd been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also a form of deafness? If so, what was silence?

Sometimes, I think, you can look at a person and know they are full of words. Maybe the words are withheld due to pain or privacy, or maybe subterfuge. Maybe there are knife-edged words waiting to draw blood.

She said the music made her wonder, Does it alter us more to be heard, or to hear?

Light from the tanks found him, as if they could collect all the irreconcilable parts of his life. No matter how many lights they shone, they could never take away the darkness. Daylight was blinding, but in the dark he still existed. What did they see, he wondered, his hands still open. Of all the people he had loved and who had loved him, of all the things that he had witnessed, lived and hoped for, of all the music he had created, how much was it possible to see?

One thing I have learned, dear Sparrow, is that light is never still and solid and so it is with love. Light can be split into many directions. Its nature is to break apart. My

Sound had a freedom that no thought could equal because a sound made no absolute claim on meaning. Any word, on the other hand, could be forced to signify its opposite.

Unless we know the weight of our bodies, unless we feel the force of gravity, we'll forget what we are, we'll lose ourselves without even noticing.

Q: How do you tell an extroverted mathematician from an introverted one? A: An extroverted mathematician stares at your shoes when talking to you.

I assumed that when the story finished, life would continue and I would go back to being myself. But it wasn't true. The stories got longer and longer, and I got smaller and smaller. When I told Big Mother this, she laughed her head off. "But that's how the world is, isn't it?

did I yearn for a new eye as a window to the outside world, or for the world to look in on me?

Was this a real story, Sparrow had wondered, or was it something like the book of records, an imagines survival?

There was Glenn Gould hunched over the piano, wearing a dark suit, hearing patterns far beyond the range of what most of us are given to perceive,

you out here," Ridge said.