Quotes About Perception

Subjective experience is not just one of the dimensions of life, it is life itself.

You could say that I worked every minute of my life, or you could say with equal justice that I never worked a day.

Creative people are constantly surprised. They don't assume that they understand what is happening around them, and they don't assume that anybody else does either. They question the obvious—not out of contrariness but because they see the shortcomings of accepted explanations before the rest of us do. They sense problems before they are generally perceived and are able to define what they are.

Of course my own self exists solely in my own consciousness; in that of others who know me there will be versions of it, most of them probably unrecognizable likenesses of the "original"—myself as I see me.

Si te sientes dolido por las cosas externas, no son éstas las que te molestan, sino tu propio juicio acerca de ellas.

To many people activities like working or raising children provide more flow than playing a game or painting a picture, because these individuals have learned to perceive opportunities in such mundane tasks that others do not see.

the apathy of many of the people around us is not due to their being physically or mentally exhausted. The problem seems to lie more in the modern worker's relation to his job, with the way he perceives his goals in relation to it.

s come true. The time channeled into such a task is perceived as time subtracted from the total available for our life. Many people consider their jobs as something they have to do, a burden imposed from the outside, an effort that takes life away from the ledger of their existence. So even though the momentary on-the-job experience may be positive, they tend to discount it, because it does not contribute to their own long-range goals.

It does not matter whether we see or we not-see, as long as we are in control of what is happening to us. The same person can meditate in the morning and shut out all sensory experience, and then look at a great work of art in the afternoon; either way he may be transformed by the same sense of exhilaration.

Over a lifetime of seventy years, and counting sixteen hours of waking time each day, this amounts to about 185 billion bits of information. It is out of this total that everything in our life must come—every thought, memory, feeling, or action. It seems like a huge amount, but in reality it does not go that far.

Marco Aurelio escribió: «Si te sientes dolido por las cosas externas, no son éstas las que te molestan, sino tu propio juicio acerca de ellas. Y está en tu poder el cambiar este juicio ahora mismo».

And the great emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: "If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now.

It is not the hearing that improves life, it is the listening.

But symbols can be deceptive: they have a tendency to distract from the reality they are supposed to represent.

Developing a discriminating palate, like any other skill, requires the investment of psychic energy. But the energy invested is returned many times over in a more complex experience. The

el gran emperador Marco Aurelio escribió: «Si te sientes dolido por las cosas externas, no son éstas las que te molestan, sino tu propio juicio acerca de ellas. Y está en tu poder el cambiar este juicio ahora mismo».

To the extent that a glamorous ad makes us salivate for the product sold or that a frown from the boss spoils the day, we are not free to determine the content of experience

A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening "outside," just by changing the contents of consciousness. We

The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body.

Since what we experience is reality, as far as we are concerned, we can transform reality to the extent that we influence what happens in consciousness and thus free ourselves from the threats and blandishments of the outside world.

Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them," said Epictetus

Marcus Aurelius wrote: "If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now.

In any case, an individual can experience only so much. Therefore, the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; it is, in fact, what determines the content and the quality of life.

Information enters consciousness either because we intend to focus attention on it or as a result of attentional habits based on biological or social instructions.