Quotes About Perception

A policeman grips an arm to take you somewhere, but why does a wife stroke your hand? What was the purpose? It wasn't the touch Cosmopolitan had talked about, and it certainly didn't boost my mood.

But she'll be there in the bathroom and she won't know how she got there.' 'And have you never walked into a room and wondered what you came in for? Have you never forgotten what you just did?

She liked this life – or more precisely, she liked the version of herself in this life.

You see, the language of words was only one of the human languages. There were many others, as I have pointed out. The language of sighs, the language of silent moments, and most significantly, the language of frowns.

A picture of a pipe is not a pipe, as Magritte told us. There is a permanent gap between the signifier and the thing signified. An online profile of your best friend is not your best friend. A status update about a day in the park is not a day in the park. And the desire to tell the world about how happy you are is not how happy you are.

situations and chemistries didn't change, perspectives could. 'It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Newton dragging me forward until we reached a large stretch of grass. This is what dogs liked to do, I discovered. They liked tout, I had to admit, it worked for them, and for Newton in particular. It was a collective illusion they had chosen to swallow and they were submitting to it wholeheartedly, without any nostalgia for their former wolf selves.

Depression can be exacerbated by things being all right externally, because the gulf between what you are feeling and what you are expected to feel becomes larger. If you feel the same amount of depression as someone would naturally feel in a prisoner of war camp, but you are not in a prisoner of war camp, and are instead in a nice semi-detached house in a free world, then you think "Crap, this is everything I ever wanted, why aren't I happy?

It is a popular modern idea. That the inner us is something different to the outer us. That there is an authentic realer and better and richer version of ourselves which we can only tap into by buying a solution. This idea that we are separate from our nature, as separate as a bottle of Dior perfume is from the plants of a forest.

So, you see? Sometimes regrets aren't based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . . A load of bullshit.

regla principal es que, si quieres parecer cuerdo en la Tierra, tienes que estar en el lugar adecuado, llevar las ropas adecuadas, decir las cosas adecuadas y pisar solo el césped adecuado.

That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective.

Aunt Carlotta is a lonely woman. She's a lot older than me. She's really an old lady now. She's forty-two. Hardly anyone lives to be forty-two.

And the great thing about this—the liberating thing—is that if our anxiety is in part a product of culture, it can also be something we can change by changing our reaction to that culture. In fact, we don't even need to consciously change at all. The change can happen simply by being aware. When it comes to our minds, awareness is very often the solution itself.

They can despise the man who kills his wife in rage but worship the indifferent soldier who drops a bomb killing a hundred children.

I don't know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken. They probably weren't. But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.

When I opened my eyes I saw Tchaikovsky with his baton, seemingly pulling the music right out of the air, as if music was something already in the atmosphere.

Hugo shrugged. 'If I was religious, I'd say it was God. And as God is probably someone we can't see or comprehend then He – or She – or whichever pronoun God is

There was also the option of a "vest," which covered the marginally less shameful chest area. This area included the sensitive skin protrusions known as "nipples." I had no idea what purpose nipples served, though I did notice a pleasurable sensation when I tenderly stroked my fingers over them.

Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another.

I had a feeling of dizziness caused by that rare sense that things were moving fast, not just in my life but in the world. I had been in New York for a few hours now, and the feeling had not waned.

and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.

Problemen met de geestelijke gezondheid zijn geen: Massahysterie. Modegril. Bevlieging. Trend bij sterren. Gevolg van toegenomen bewustzijn van geestelijke problematiek. Gemakkelijk gespreksonderwerp. En: geestelijke problemen zijn niet meer wat ze geweest zijn.

What we are and what we mean are different things. It's fine. The world makes it very hard not to be a prick.