Quotes About Perception

Silence and reserve will give anyone a reputation for wisdom.

Listen with your eyes because here you cannot decipher what is said out of the effort of mouths.

She was not listening at the level of language but beneath it, in the deep recesses of the imagination.

Yes, I thought, now I see the earth as it really is; never again will I see things as I saw them yesterday or the day before.

Such vastness makes for illusion, a kind of illusion that comprehends reality, and where it exists there is always wonder and exhilaration.

To say "beyond the mountain," and to mean it, to mean, simply, beyond everything for which the mountain stands, of which it signifies the being. Somewhere, if only she could see it, there was neither nothing nor anything. And there, just there, that was the last reality.

La belleza, como la justicia, se nos escurre entre los dedos. Fotografiamos una puesta de sol, pero todo lo que conseguimos es el recuerdo del momento, no el instante en sí.

Things aren't always what they seem, are they?

Fern's eyes as "the unpleasant deformity.

La verdad es como una manta que nos deja los pies fríos. Ya puede uno tirar de ella hacia sí en todos los sentidos, que nunca nos cubrirá del todo. Sacudidla, tirad de ella, mas nunca será suficiente. Desde el día en que se viene al mundo, llorando, a aquel a quien se le entrega, agonizante, no puede hacer más que cubrirse con ella la cabeza y gemir, llorar o aullar.

Cuando era niño, creía que los padres querían a sus hijos instintivamente. Era lo que me enseñaban en el colegio; y yo acabé creyéndomelo. Pero mis padres parecen reservar todo su amor a mi hermano.

La poesía puede estar oculta en los objetos o las acciones más cotidianas, pero nunca, nunca deber ser común.

We have to grow into Scripture, like a young boy inheriting his older brother's clothes and flopping around in them, but he gradually builds out and grows up. Perhaps it's a measure of our maturity when parts of Scripture that we found odd or even repellent suddenly come up in a new light. Our sense is overtaken by a sense of the whole thing, wide, multicolored, and unspeakably powerful.

The Psalms do not, that is, offer us an answer for "the problem of evil." But they are clear where the answer is not to be found. It is not to be found where the pantheist wants to find it, suggesting that "evil" is merely a matter of our perception and that the world just is the way it is and we should get used to it.

When the women went to the tomb they met someone else and in the half light they thought it was Jesus himself. Answer: they would have noticed soon enough.

Perhaps even "his own people"—this time not the Jewish people of the first century, but the would-be Christian people of the Western world—have not been ready to recognize Jesus himself. We want a "religious" leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus's contemporaries did.

To write or read a poem is . . . to enter into a different kind of thought world from our normal patterns. A poem is not merely ordinary thought with a few turns and twiddles added on to make it pretty or memorable. A poem (a good poem, at least) uses its poetic form to probe deeper into human experience than ordinary speech or writing is usually able to do, to pull back a veil and allow the hearer or reader to sense other dimensions.

We applaud patience but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.

Jesus's message to his contemporaries, and the church's message about Jesus, never fit what people expect. Often enough, they don't fit what the church itself expects.

there is no such thing as a god's-eye view (by which would be meant a Deist god's-eye view) available to human beings, a point of view which is no human's point of view.

Saying "It's true for you" sounds fine and tolerant. But it only works because it's twisting the word "true" to mean, not "a true revelation of the way things are in the real world," but "something that is genuinely happening inside you.

Jesus as a "teacher" is much safer than Jesus as the gospels actually present him.

We mustn't imagine that our feeling of being close to God is a true index of the reality.

The voice of Satan is often hard to recognise precisely because it appears so frequently as the voice of common sense, of prudence, of reason.