Quotes About Perception

Frank Sheed once said, "The secular novelist sees what is visible; the Christian novelist sees what is there.

if you cannot identify the divine in any positive way, how do you even know it is real?

Powerful logical or metaphysical reasons for supposing we can't have strong free will keep coming up against equally powerful psychological reasons why we can't help believing that we do have it.… It seems that we cannot live or experience our choices as determined, even if determinism is true.

Why is it considered acceptable to carve up a person's body to match their inner sense of self but bigoted to help them change their sense of self to match their body?

Christianity was permitted to tell Sunday school stories as object lessons to inspire morality, but it was not allowed to claim that those stories were true.

Outside the ivory tower, ordinary people are not interested in a worldview that spins out a logically coherent system, and yet contradicts human experience. They are looking for a worldview that makes sense of the world we actually inhabit. They want one that explains the undeniable facts of human experience, not one that suppresses those facts for the sake of its own internal logical consistency.

children tend to hold a concept of God even if their parents are atheists.

Artists are often the barometers of society.

If you have sensory issues yourself, keep in mind that sensory problems manifest differently in every person, and they can even differ from day to day.

tall women of Swedish descent attract attention that's way out of proportion to our relative importance to the world.

The movies were custard compared to politics.

Practice alternating your focus between the big picture and small detail by allowing your eyes to focus broadly, then narrowing in on detail, going back and forth several times during a standard painting session. This movement from big to small and its reverse keeps your right brain active. It also helps integrate parts of your image to the whole.

My grandmother accused me of hurting my mother. Other relatives accused me of being an ungrateful child. Mom said I was mean and cruel and had hurt her deeply. Still impressionable and my spirits tottering under the load of the pain from the past, I accepted the notion that I was that selfish and ungrateful daughter, careless of my mother's feelings.

In childhood as well as adulthood, each time I shared my feelings with someone, the chosen confidant denied my perceptions

While we might believe that pretty is as pretty does, on some level we want to see youth and beauty as signs of goodness, of innocence. The attractive woman is given a pass. The ugly one gets the chair.

Daryl said Amanda was "a good mother, except for the cleaning up after, the feeding, and the caretaking part.

we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.

There is no such thing as an immutable truth, much as our hearts might yearn for it and our justice systems demand it; there are only the stories we tell ourselves.

you can write about sociopaths, you can read all about them, and chances are you will not recognize one when he is taking you in.

The stories could be true, or they could be conjecture; people stuck stories to her like wet plaster. Into what position would they set?

Hysterical. That word had unfortunate ramifications.

To some "housewife" has become a dirty word.

For some, Stoicism will always put the accent note in the wrong place.

Yet one could speak truth and still be a villain