Quotes About Perception

In the absence of facts, he thinks, we tell ourselves stories.

This is who we had become by then, people who gathered in the rain, arguing over whether or not they were getting wet.

Since when does how a thing looks matter more than what it is?

It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world—sights, sounds, smells—into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past. But what happens when those details crumble?

We are all victims of our brains. They tell us to do things and we do them. They tell us to believe things and we believe them. They hide our blind spots from us. All the while we believe we are making choices.

As an engineer, he finds the act of art beyond him. The idea that the object itself: canvas, wood and oil is not the point. And that instead, some intangible experience created from the suggestion -- from the intersection of materials, colors, and content has been created. Art exists not inside the piece itself, but inside the mind of the viewer.

Though the language spoken here appears to be the same, the meaning of each word can be vastly different. What they mean when they say freedom. What they mean when they say equal. What they mean when they say fair.

And James was a believer in mystery. Not like his mum, who never met a phantasmagorical ideology she didn't embrace instantly and completely, but in the manner of Albert Einstein, who once said, "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.

Once anointed a hero by your fellow man, you lose the right to privacy. You become an object, stripped of some unquantifiable humanity, as if you have won a cosmic lottery and woke one day to find yourself a minor deity. The Patron Saint of Good Luck. It stops mattering what you wanted for yourself. All that matters is the role you played in the lives of others. You are a rare butterfly held roughly at a right angle to the sun.

It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world--sights, sounds, smells--into coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past. But what happens when those details crumble? Hailstones on a tin roof....What happens when your life can't be translated into a linear narrative?

The lives we live, he thinks, are filled with holes.

But Doug had the same clichéd overreaction to wealth that defined most bearded men his age.

What I believe is irrelevant. In the last year, belief in Bigfoot rose from eleven percent to twenty-five percent. Here's another figure: thirty percent of Americans believe that aliens have visited Earth in the not-too-distant past.

I believe the world lives on the edge between magic and science," he says finally. "And that it tips back and forth, depending on what we believe.

Sitting in the back of a cab, Scott pictures the boy eating cereal in front of the tv late at night - unable to sleep - watching a dog drawn from letters d-o-g talk to a cat drawn from the letters c-a-t. If only real life were that simple, where everyone we met and every place we went was fashioned from the pure essence of its identity. Where you looked at a man and saw the letters f-r-i-e-n-d, and looked at a woman and saw the word w-i-f-e.

She doesn't like looking straight at things. She's a peripheral person.

Warhol, who understood the idea that the self was just a story we told. Reinvention

Pain and suffering are two completely difference experiences. Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is self-created.

Remember that what you believe will depend very much on what you are.

How it is we have so much information, but know so little?

was Balzac, half in jest, who mused, 'What will become of the world when all women are like George Sand?

its discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by decite

Las Vegas: It was not cafe society, it was Nescafe society.

We figured that if a promoter took the time to remove all the brown M&M's from the bowl before putting them in our dressing room, it was far less likely he'd screwed up any of the other, really important stuff. It