Quotes About Perception

the fact remains that there is a certain objective reality in each of these people, and consequently a difference among them.

a man of great ability will ordinarily pay less attention to other people's foolishness than would a fool.

Our love becomes immense; we never dream how small a place in it the real woman occupies. And if suddenly, as at the moment when I had seen Elstir stop to talk to the girls, we cease to be uneasy, to suffer pain, since it is this pain that is the whole of our love, it seems to us as though love had abruptly vanished at the moment when at length we grasp the prey to whose value we had not given enough thought before

We lack the sense of our own visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as quite close to us the interested attention of people who on the contrary never give us a thought, and not suspecting that we are at the same moment the sole preoccupation of others.

Et voici que le monde(qui n'a pas été créé une fois, mais aussi souvent qu'un artiste original est survenu) nous apparait entièrement différent de l'ancien, mais parfaitement clair.

But the mistake she made was only an extreme and desiccated instance of the countless mistakes, more trivial, more pointed, unintentional, or deliberate, that accompany our names on the particular index card the world allots us.

Se o rosto de uma mulher é dificilmente interpretado pelos nossos olhos, que não podem aplicar-se a toda essa superfície movediça, aos lábios, mais ainda, à memória; se nuvens o alteram conforme sua posição social e conforme a altura em que estamos situados, que cortina mais espessa ainda está corrida entre os atos daquela a quem vemos, e suas razões!

Jean would be conscious of a curious feeling that he was living simultaneously in the immediate presence of a particular day and in other similar days of long ago.

perhaps indeed there exists but a single intelligence of which everyone is a co-tenant, an intelligence towards which each of us from out of his own separate body turns his eyes, as int a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage.

Self-centeredness thus making each man a king, enabling him to see the ordered ranks of the universe beneath him,

It is the tragedy of other people that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one's own mind.

Não há nada como o desejo para impedir que as coisas que se dizem possuam qualquer semelhança com o que se tem no pensamento.

since my sorrow was directed not at what Albertine had been for me but at what my heart, desiring to participate in the more general emotions of love, had come to persuade me that she was; then I realized that this life which had so bored me—or at least so I thought—had, on the contrary, been delicious;

but other people, as we get to know them, are like a metal dipped in an acid bath, and we see them gradually lose their good qualities (and their bad qualities too, at times).

I was struck for the first time by this lack of harmony between our impressions and their normal forms of expression.

Memory, instead of being a duplicate always present before our eyes of the various events of our life, is rather an abyss from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables us to draw up, restored to life, dead impressions; but even then there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever beyond our control.

there is always less egoism in pure imagination than in recollection;

There are some faces which take on an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they no longer have a gaze.

But failure to understand a joke has never yet made anyone find it less amusing,

When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.

I said something friendly or even admiring to her. She was like almost all women, who imagine that the compliment they receive is a strict expression of the truth, that it is a judgment passed impartially, irresistibly, as though it applied to an art object unconnected with a particular individual. And so it was with a seriousness that made me blush at my own hypocrisy that she put the vain and artless question customary in such circumstances, "You like it?

Mas uma lembrança, um pesar são coisas móveis. Dias há em que se vão para tão longe que mal os distinguimos e os julgamos desaparecidos. Começamos então a atentar noutras coisas.

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own. Besides,