Quotes About Perception

Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is the power of the guidebook maker, however ignorant.

Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun,—part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal.

What can poor mortals say about clouds?

Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen.

Everybody has an idea of himself which augments, aggravates, or modifies the actuality.

We judge things by their present appearances, but the Lord sees them in their consequences.

Truth is paradox.

May the expectation in other eyes Never decide how you are to be;

The soul is always wiser than the mind, even though we are dependent on the mind to read the soul for us.

Only the blindness of habit convinces us that we continue to live in the same place, that we see the same landscape. In truth, no place ever remains the same because light has no mind for repetition; it adores difference. Through its illuminations, it strives to suggest the silent depths that hide in the dark. Light

We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us. If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly.

One of the greatest tragedies of our time is that everyone is ripping off second hand thinking. We can liberate ourselves by trusting our own instinct and finding the thought-lenses which show us our world in the way we need to see it, that can calm and bring us home, and also challenge us.

Television and the computer world are great empty shadow-lands. To look at something that can gaze back at you, or that has a reserve and depth, can heal your eyes and deepen your sense of vision.

Kathleen Raine, a Scottish poet, says that unless you see a thing in the light of love, you do not see it at all. Love is the light in which we see light.

I feel that fear is negative wonder. It is the point at which wonder begins to consume itself and scrape off the essence of things.

they don't know that the outside could be the inside if only they would stop all this pushing and shoving and screaming, and they haven't got enough sense to realize that.

No one can see God's face" (see Exodus 33:20). What do they mean when they say that no one can see God's face? They mean that we cannot see God as he is. We are not capable of this. We inevitably project our own fallenness onto God.

Earth's crammed with Heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes — The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

They will readily change truth for error, who find no more sweetness in the one than in the other.

By some men's too much understanding, others are brought to understand nothing at all.

My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant total amazement.

I had begun to understand that although most Americans have no idea that lifestyles are built on exploitation, millions of people in other countries are aware of it.

If the world is as you dream it, why had I dreamed such a world?

The philosopher Ernst Mach once got on a bus, and saw a scruffy unkempt bookish-looking person at the far end. He thought to himself (1) That man is a shabby pedagogue. In fact, Mach was seeing himself in a large mirror at the far end of the bus, of the sort conductors used to help keep track of things. He eventually realized this, and thought to himself: (2) I am that man. (3) I am a shabby pedagogue.