Quotes About Perception

It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.

It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child's world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when they do not fit and draw new ones.

Part of the far shore disappeared into a shimmer that looked like water. There was no certainty in seeing, no proof that what you saw was there or was not there. And the people of the Gulf expected all places were that way, and it was not strange to them.

Nobody knows. What good's an opinion if you don't know? My grandfather knew the number of whiskers in the Almighty's beard. I don't even know what happened yesterday, let alone tomorrow. He knew what it was that makes a rock or table. I don't even understand the formula that says nobody knows. We've got nothing to go on -- got no way to think about things.

Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?

He's got a can up there,' Richard said.

Guy knows all about women he don't know nothing about a woman.

And he saw the right evening star reflected in her eyes, and he saw the black cloud reflected in her eyes.

Tiny emerged on deck some hours later, shaken but smiling. He said that what he had been considering love had turned out to be simple flatulence. He said he wished all his romantic problems could be solved as easily.

Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.

You can't make a race horse of a pig." "No," said Samuel, "but you can make a very fast pig.

The bird looked much smaller dead than alive. Jody felt a little mean pain in his stomach, so he took out his pocketknife and cut off the bird's head. Then he disemboweled it, and took off its wings; and finally he threw all the pieces into the brush. He didn't care about the bird, or its life, but he knew what older people would say if they had seen him kill it; he was ashamed because of their potential opinion.

You must name a thing before you can note it on your hand drawn map.

Bring new eyes to a world even new lenses and presto, new world.

Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary-do you hear? Who are you in there?

I nearly forgot something my old father told me not long before he died. He said the threshold of insult is in direct relation to intelligence and security.

Perhaps it is so with everyone, that he looks for weakness in the strong to find promise of strength in his weakness.

They were students of the expressions of young women as they went in to confession, and they saw them as they came out and read the nature of the sin.

A writer of stories is a liar.

A reputation for money is almost as negotiable as money itself.

Cathy did not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of lying. She stayed close enough to the truth so that one could never be sure. She knew two other methods also––either to interlard her lies with truth or to tell a truth as though it were a lie. If one is accused of a lie and it turns out to be the truth, there is a backlog that will last a long time and protect a number of untruths.

It is good to know what you are doing. The man with his pickled fish has set down one truth and has recorded in his experience many lies. The fish is not that color, that texture, that dead, nor does he smell that way.

They had not grown up in the paradoxes of industry. Their senses were still sharp to the ridiculousness of the industrial life.

There's a part of you missing. Some men can't see the color green, but they may never know they can't. I think you are only a part of a human. I can't do anything about that. But I wonder whether you ever feel that something invisible is all around you. It would be horrible if you knew it was there and couldn't see it or feel it.