Quotes About Perception

A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift.

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a fresh, a third, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourself, the lover. And so there are very few who can regard as natural the enormous proportions that a creature comes to assume in our eyes who is not the same as the creature that they see.

Kadar ?lovek ljubi, je ljubezen prevelika, da bi jo mogel obdržati vso v sebi samem; tedaj ljubezen izžareva proti ljubljenemu bitju, naleti v njem na ploskev, ki jo prestreže in odbije proti izhodiš?u, in ta odboj lastnih ?ustev imamo za ljubezen onega drugega bitja ter smo od nje vsi o?arani, saj ne spoznamo, da izvira iz nas.

The words that passed between the girls of the little band and myself were not of any interest; they were, moreover, but few, broken by long spells of silence on my part. All of which did not prevent me from finding, in listening to them when the spoke to me, as much pleasure as in gazing at them, in discovering in the voice of each one of them a brightly colored picture. It was with ecstasy that I caught their pipings.

A grande modificação que provoca em nós o despertar consiste menos em introduzir-nos na vida clara da consciência que em fazer-nos perder a lembrança da luz um pouco mais tamisada em que repousava a nossa inteligência, como no fundo opalino das águas.

tout cela qui prend forme et solidité, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé.

The words that passed between the girls of the little band and myself were not of any interest; they were, moreover, but few, broken by long spells of silence on my part. All of which did not prevent me from finding, in listening to them when they spoke to me, as much pleasure as in gazing at them, in discovering in the voice of each one of them a brightly colored picture. It was with ecstasy that I caught their pipings.

Perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed on them by our certainty that they are themselves and not others, by the immobility of our mind confronting them.

Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness.

Na realidade, todo leitor é, quando lê, o leitor de si mesmo. A obra não passa de uma especie de instrumento óptico oferecido ao leitor a fim de lhe ser possível discernir o que, sem ela, não teria certamente visto em si mesmo. O reconhecimento, por seu foro íntimo, do que diz o livro, é a prova da verdade deste [...].

since the beauty of human beings is not like the beauty of things,

He who is in the wrong believes himself in the right, as was the case with Germany, and he who is in the right supports it with arguments which only appear irrefutable to him because they respond to his anger.

Without inquiring too deeply into the causes which make it possible to find subjects of gaiety always close at hand, the proof of that possibility can be found in the fact that persons of sensitive intelligence are capable of finding comic potentialities in everything and everybody, thereby demonstrating that if some people hold the belief that there is very little that is laughable in the world, the reason is that they lack the ability to find it.

But, just as we do not possess that sense of direction with which certain birds are endowed, so we lack the sense of our own visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as quite close to us the interested attention of the people who on the contrary never give us a thought, and not suspecting that we are at the same time the sole preoccupation of others.

E recomecei a escutar, a sofrer; quando estamos à espera, do ouvido que recolhe os ruídos ao espírito que os despoja e analisa, e do espírito ao coração a quem ele transmite os seus resultados, tão rápido é o duplo trajeto que nem sequer lhe podemos perceber a duração, e parece estarmos escutando diretamente com o nosso coração.

nous ne connaissons jamais que les passions des autres, et que ce que nous arrivons à savoir des nôtres, ce n'est que d'eux que nous avons pu l'apprendre.

Stiamo tutti costretti, per renderci sopportabile la realtà, a coltivare dentro di noi qualche piccola follia.

That is rather Pelléas, too," I suggested to Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin. "You know the scene I mean." "Of course I do" was what she said; but "I haven't the faintest idea" was the message proclaimed by her voice and features, which did not mould themselves to the shape of any recollection, and by her smile, which floated in the air, without support.

She refrained from uttering it? So at least I long believed, for at that time I still supposed that it was by means of words that one communicated the truth to others.

indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?

Of a different order again were those of M. de Charlus, as we shall presently see, with people wholly unlike Mme. de Villeparisis. In spite of which we must bear in mind that the opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk, are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

At a time when I believed what people told me, I should have been tempted to believe Germany, then Bulgaria, then Greece when they proclaimed their pacific intentions. But since my life with Albertine and with Françoise had accustomed me to suspect those motives they did not express, I did not allow any word, however right in appearance of William II, Ferdinand of Bulgaria or Constantine of Greece to deceive my instinct which divined what each one of them was plotting.

As pessoas mundanas estão de tal modo acostumadas a que as procurem que quem lhes foge parece-lhes uma fênix e domina-lhes por inteiro o pensamento.

Les êtres nous sont d'habitude si indifférents que, quand nous avons mis dans l'un d'eux de telles possibilités de souffrance et de joie pour nous, il nous semble appartenir à un autre univers, il s'entoure de poésie, il fait de notre vie comme une étendue émouvante où il sera plus ou moins rapproché de nous.