Quotes About Perception

At last, in Albertine walking with the lady in gray down the little street that led to the bath-house, I saw before my eyes a fragment of that past which seemed to me no less mysterious and terrifying than I had feared when I imagined it enclosed within Albertine's eyes and within her memories.

Unfortunately, if the eyes are sometimes the organ through which our intelligence is revealed, the nose (to leave out of account the intimate solidarity and the unsuspected repercussion of one feature upon the rest), the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

Aunque nada cambie, si yo cambio, todo cambia.

Self-interest implicit in not being wrong in our pre-judgment limits the time we shall remember it and encourages us to believe we never indulged in it.

The peculiar tendency which he had always had to look for analogies between living people and the portraits in galleries reasserted itself here,

No por saber una cosa se la puede impedir; pero siquiera las cosas que averiguamos las tenemos, si no entre las manos, por lo menos en el pensamiento, y allí están a nuestra disposición, lo cual nos inspira la ilusión de gozar sobre ellas una especie de dominio

And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her? I felt that she would have regarded me as mad, for I no longer thought of those desires which came to me on my walks, but were never realized, as being shared by others, or as having any existence apart from myself.

Ah! there is a man who justifies the wit who insisted that one ought never to know an author except through his books.

They seemed nothing more now than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creatures of my temperament

Les faits ne pénètrent pas dans le monde où vivent nos croyances, ils n'ont pas fait naître celles-ci, ils ne les détruisent pas.

bij alles wat het stempel draagt van de werkelijke dood, die zo verschilt van zijn logische en abstracte mogelijkheid ...

Y, a partir de aquel instante, yo no tenía que dar ni un solo paso, el suelo caminaba por mí en aquel jardín

In actual fact, his nature was really like a sheet of paper in which so many folds have been made in every direction that it is impossible to know where you are.

Now are the woods all black, But still the sky is blue.

Look: each moment is a cradle and a casket: may all life and all death seem strange to you.

As masks are the sign that there are faces, words are the sign that there are things. And these things are the sign of the incomprehensible.

Do not be surprised,' she said. 'It is I, and it is not I; You shall find me again, and you shall lose me; Once more shall I come among you; for few men have seen me, and none has understood me; And you shall forget me, and you shall recognize me, and you shall forget me.

Look: each moment is a cradle and a casket: may all life and all death seem strange and new to you.

I loved my father, but I was not like him. I never needed to believe the best of people. I took them as they were: two-faced, desperate, kind - perhaps all at once. But to Pa, they were all children of god, poor troubled sheep, who only needed love and an even break. He needed the world to back up what his religion told him about people. And when it came down to a choice between reason and faith, he let go of reason.

He didn't seem conventionally insane in any way that I could understand. But there was no way of comprehending him. In some eerie and fundamental way, he didn't appear to belong to our world. But that didn't seem the same as being mad.

It's a kind of heresy to say so, but I think our race has made forms more beautiful than what was here before us. Sometimes god's handiwork is crude. There is no more ugly thing than a lobster. There's not much pretty about a caribou. It has an ungainly walk and its touchhole voids droppings when it strains in harness. Was there a straight line on earth before we drew one?

Was there a straight line on earth before we drew one?

the mustard on the roof of my mouth gave me the feeling that someone was removing my nasal hair with a blowtorch.

my friends would say to me, You, insecure, when you're that beautiful? I would reply, The one has nothing to do with the other.