Quotes About Perception

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go to look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.

Mas, ai! — pois, para o beijo, tão mal colocados estão as nossas narinas e os nossos olhos como malfeitos os lábios —, eis que de súbito os meus olhos cessaram de ver, e o meu nariz, por sua vez , esmagando-se, não sentiu mais nenhum odor, e, sem conhecer mais , por isso, o gosto do rosa desejado, eu soube, por esses detestáveis sinais, que estava enfim beijando as faces de Albertine.

Even if we live in a hermetically sealed compartment, associations of ideas, memories continue to act upon us.

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Pois o que nós julgamos seja o nosso amor, o nosso ciúme, não é uma mesma paixão contínua, indivisível. Compõem-se eles de uma infinidade de amores sucessivos, de ciúmes diferentes, mas, por sua multidão ininterrupta, dão a impressão da continuidade, a ilusão da unidade.

and helped me better understand what a contradiction it is to search in reality for memory's pictures, which would never have the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from not being perceived by the senses.

The true greatness of art is to find, grasp, and bring out that reality which we all live a great distance from; that reality which we run the risk of dying without having known, which is quite simply our own life.

Hata, ba?kalar?n?n tatl?l???na, zekâs?na kay?ts?z kalmam?zd?r.

When I saw any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form;

In any case, Swann was blind not only to the gaps in Odette's education, but also to her poverty of mind. Indeed, when she told one of her silly stories, he would listen to her full of an obliging, cheerful, even admiring attentiveness, which could be explained only by his finding her still sexually arousing;

Ce qui est étonnant, dit-il, c'est que ce public qui ne juge ainsi des hommes et des choses de la guerre que par les journaux est persuadé qu'il juge par lui-même. »

That is how I see her to this day: standing there, her eyes shining under her toque, silhouetted against the backdrop of the sea, and separated from me by the transparent sky-blue stretch of time elapsed since that moment, the first glimpse of her in my memory, a very slight image of a face first desired and pursued, then forgotten, then found again, a face which since then I have often projected into the past, so as to say to myself, of a girl with me in my bedroom, 'That was her!

Hélas! Albertine était plusieurs personnes.

A necessidade de falar impede não só de escutar mas também de ver, e nesse caso a ausência de qualquer descrição do meio exterior é já uma descrição de um estado interno.

Pieni kopaus ikkunaruutuun kuin jokin olisi töytäissyt siihen, sitten väljä kevyt varina kuin ikkunasta kerrosta ylempää olisi heitetty hiekkajyviä, sittern varina laajeni, muuttui säännölliseksi, omaksui rytmin, tuli juoksevaksi, sointuvaksi, musikaaliseksi, määrittämättömäksi, kaiken käsittäväksi: satoi.

Some philosophers argue that the external world does not exist and that it is only within ourselves that our lives evolve. Be that as it may, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means for us. If I had had to draw, describe or inventory the details of Mlle d'Éporcheville's features from memory, or even to recognize her in the street, I would have found it impossible.

For the very ones who are right, like Françoise, have also to be wrong, so that Justice becomes an impossibility

How many times in the course of my life reality had disappointed me because at the moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only means of enjoying beauty, could not be applied to it by virtue of the inevitable law which only allows us to imagine that which is absent.

Let but a single real feature—the little that one distinguishes of a woman seen from afar or from behind—enable us to project the form of beauty before our eyes, we imagine that we have seen her before, our heart beats, we hasten in pursuit, and will always remain half-persuaded that it was she, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake.

He had always found a peculiar fascination in tracing in the paintings of the Old Masters, not merely the general characteristics of the people whom he encountered in his daily life, but rather what seems least susceptible of generalisation, the individual features of men and women whom he knew,

we do not know what a thing is until we have approached it with our intelligence.

The reason why life may be judged to be trivial, although at certain moments to us, it seems so beautiful, is that we form our judgement ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself, but of the mental images which preserve nothing of life and therefore, we judge it disparagingly.

this early Swann in whom I can distinguish the charming mistakes of my childhood, and who, incidentally, is less like his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as though one's life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the same (so to speak) tonality

La muraille de l'escalier où je vis monter le reflet de sa bougie n'existe plus depuis longtemps. En moi aussi bien des choses ont été détruites que je croyais devoir durer toujours, et de nouvelles se sont édifiées, donnant naissance à des peines et à des joies nouvelles que je n'aurais pu prévoir alors, de même que les anciennes me sont devenues difficiles à comprendre.