Quotes About Perception

It smells all right; it makes your head go round; it catches your breath; you feel ticklish all over - and not the faintest clue how it's done. The man's a sorcerer; the thing's a conjuring trick, it's a miracle,"...

Because of the infinite quality of love, or its egotism, the intellectual and spiritual physiognomy of the people we love are the least objectively defined for us. We are constantly retouching them to suit our desires and our fears; we do not separate them from us; they are but an immense and vague place where our affections exteriorize themselves.

The illusions of paternal love are perhaps no less poignant than those of the other kind; many daughters regard their fathers merely as the old men who leave their fortunes to them.

There are optical errors in time as there are in space.

Benim insanlar?n zekas?yla ilgili dü?üncem bazen de?i?ir;ama de?i?menin onlar?n zekas? de?il, benim dü?üncem oldu?unu gayet iyi bilirim.

Yes, I have been forced to whittle down the facts, and to be a liar, but it is not one universe, there are millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and brains in existence, that awake every morning.

The reality that must be expressed resides, I now realised, not in the appearance of the subject but in the degree of penetration of that intuition to a depth where that appearance matters little, as symbolised by the sound of the spoon upon the plate, the stiffness of the table-napkin, which were more precious for my spiritual renewal than many humanitarian, patriotic, international conversations. More style, I had heard said in those days, more literature of life.

Repeatedly, I dare say, when pretty girls went by, I had promised myself that I would see them again. As a rule, people do not appear a second time; moreover our memory, which speedily forgets their existence, would find it difficult to recall their appearance; our eyes would not recognise them, perhaps, and in the meantime we have seen new girls go by, whom we shall not see again either.

Swann's father, an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts. Several

Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth...

All the great writers are like that: the beauty of their sentences, like the beauty of a woman one has not yet met, is unforeseeable...

A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.

I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time.

Às vezes erguia eu os olhos a algum vasto apartamento antigo cujos postigos não estavam fechados e onde homens e mulheres anfíbios, readaptando-se cada noite a viver em outro elemento que de dia, lentamente nadavam no denso licor que, ao anoitecer, surde incessantemente do reservatório das lâmpadas para encher as peças até à borda das suas paredes de pedra e vidro, e no seio do qual eles propagavam, deslocando os corpos, redemoinhos untuosos e dourados.

Life is like that little sweetheart. We dream it and we love it in dreaming it. We should not try to live it: otherwise, like that little boy, we will plunge into stupidity, though not at one swoop, for in life everything degenerates by imperceptible nuances. At the end of ten years we no longer recognize our dreams; we deny them, we live, like a cow, for the grass we are grazing on at the moment. And who knows if our wedding with death might not lead to our conscious immortality?

She lived her life, but I may have been the only one to dream it.

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow.

Photography acquires a certain dignity, which it does not normally have, when it is not just a reproduction of reality but can show us things that no longer exist.

novels contained something inexpressibly delicious.

So that every fresh encounter is a sort of rectification, which brings us back to what we really did see. We have no longer any recollection of this, to such an extent does what we call remembering a person consist really in forgetting him.

But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing some one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process.

Een warme gezindheid jegens anderen overdrijft het goede even graag, als de kwaadaardigheid er plezier in heeft iemand omlaag te halen.

Tentamos achar nas coisas, que por isso nos são preciosas, o reflexo que nossa alma projetou sobre elas, e desiludimo-nos ao verificar que as coisas parecem desprovidas, na natureza, do encanto que deviam, em nosso pensamento, à vizinhança de certas ideias.

The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing things, and in this case the absence of any description of my external surroundings is tantamount to a description of my internal state.