Quotes About Perception

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.

Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed.

In 2009, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second-in-command, declared: 'He [Obama] is trying to say: "Do not hate us … but we will continue to kill you".

The women don't really believe that their beloved would do such a thing,even if they're shown s severed limb or a headless torso.Or if they believe it,they know down to their bone marrow that lover-boy really had the best of intentions;it must have been some kind of very unfortunate accident,a well-meaning blunder;in fact, even more likely, it was a humanitarian act.

What our leaders and pundits never let slip is that the terrorists - whatever else they might be - might also be rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions.

The ablest diplomat will never boast of understanding a man, but only his intentions.

In politics, where everything romantic and sentimental is folly, the converse is usually considered true, and every brutality is thought sound sense

We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.

Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary - it is the respective proportion of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum.

Are our lives just the aggregate of the lies we've told? ('Lives' - the 'v' is silent.)

But you can be too intelligent, I said. Sometimes it's not an asset it's a curse.

Maybe this is what life is like - we try to see clearly but what we see is never clear and is never going to be. The more we strive the murkier it becomes. All we are left with are approximations, nuances, multitudes of plausible explanations. Take your pick.

every previous level of change comes to be called "stability." Seen in this light, what people today call "nonstop change" is simply a new level of what has always existed. It isn't pure chaos—simply a new experience. When people adjust to it, they will look back upon it as "the stability that we used to enjoy.

loss is a subjective experience, and your "objective" view (which is really just another subjective view) is irrelevant.

This picture in people's heads is the reality they live in, and one of the losses that takes place during the ending phase of a transition is that the old picture—the mental image of how and why things are the way they are—falls apart. Much of the pain of the neutral zone comes from the fact that it is a time without a viable organizational picture.

Here it was always the lightthat mattered, and only the light. Once, it had seemedthe objects mattered: the light was to see them by.Examined, they yielded nothing, nothing real.They were for seeing the light in various ways.They gathered it, released it, held it in.In them, the light revealed itself, took shape.Objects are nothing. There is only the light, the light!

Reality is what we are ignorant of.

Landscape is metaphor / and only metaphor. But, oh, I have loved it so.

In cosmos and microcosmos scale can be/so great and be so small/neither can stay believable, each/cancels the other out and we, too big/for one an unapparent otherwise/live self-scaled lives where we are as if we were./Bring some words together toward a real.

A green world, a scene of green, deep / with light blues, the greens made deep / by those blues. One thinks how / in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen / (through a window, maybe) far behind the serene / sitter's face, the serene pose, as though/in some impossible mirror, face to back, / human serenity gazed at a green world / which gazed at this face.

What we are watching now as though it were real is shadows thrown on the back of the screen by lights and puppeteers behind it whose they are we." - Whose They Are We

But if you don't have the name of a thing, it is still the thing.