Quotes About Perception

Up to then there had been something of a gentleman's agreement among those who might be called The Good Journalists of Washington that the Kennedy Administration was one of excellence, that it was for good things and against bad things, and that when it did lesser things it was only in self-defense, and in order that it might do other good things.

David Halberstam quoted Lyndon Johnson saying of a staffer: "I want him to kiss my ass in Macy's window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.

The thing is, if you're an ugly goon when you're 15, you're an ugly goon for the rest of your life — until the day you die. You're always a goon, even if lots of years go by, even if you get married and have a kid, even if you're more successful than you ever thought you'd be in your wildest dreams. You're still that same goon who everybody laughed at. It never changes.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

And do you really never look at anything -- anything at all -- and consider it might be beautiful in itself?

We need to get behind the surface appearances if we are to act coherently in the world. Otherwise, acting in response to misleading surface signals typically produces disastrous outcomes.

These data actually construct the fiction of a national economy when really there is no such thing; in Marx's terms, it is a fetish construct.

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

Do I dream you? Or you dream me? Or does someone, something bigger than all' - her hands swept the vast constellations above them - 'this beauteous calamity, dream everything we see and more?

Humour was often attached to cruelty, it seemed, and cruelty troubled Pino Fratelli.

In perennial Absence you see mystery, and in perennial Presence you see appearance. Though the two are one and the same, once they arise, they differ in name.

Keep up self-definition and you'll never be apparent.

Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the first big, big change. It confused people: they said, 'Things don't look like that!'

People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art.

Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.

It's the very process of looking at something that makes it beautiful.

I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful.

Most art will disappear. The past is edited so it always looks clearer to us. Today always looks a bit of a jumble. We'll put up with rubbish from now, but not with rubbish from the past.

Elves are extremely long-lived -- the passing years are but a blink of an eye to them. What also sets them apart from us is the very narrow window during which they can procreate, and, as a natural consequence, their very low fertility. The Aen Seidhe believe this to be the main reason for their decline. As one of my elven friends put it, "Even though we fought like wolves, we lost to a race which fucks like rabbits.

Beauty in things lies in the mind which contemplates them.