Quotes About Perception

Experience is an excellent spyglass; but it has this drawback, that Prejudice very often clouds the lens.

I have know a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.

Than to suppose that they like what is human and real, he means," said Beltran. "They don't care the least about that; they like a little broad farce, a little rough murder, and a little rosewater sentiment: anything more bothers them. They can't understand it.

You are young enough! — and yet, I don't know; it is a popular fallacy that time counts by years. One is old according to the style of one's life, not the length of it.

Nobody, except that wise woman, Rosa Bonheur, ever discerned that animals only do not speak because they are endowed with a discretion far and away over that of blatant, bellowing, gossiping, garrulous Man. "Only a dog," indeed I However, the phrase has a pretty, modest, graceful look, so let it stand. Men never are taken at their own valuation by others; and so I suppose dogs cannot expect to be either.

Why do people only tolerate Sheridan, and go into ecstasies over burlesques ?" said Beltran. "Because we want to laugh and not to think," said Denzil. "Now, to laugh at Sheridan you must first think with him.

I never judge people; seemingly bad actions may have good motives, good ones may spring from base and selfish ends.

Some report elsewhere whatever is told them; the measure of fiction always increases, and each fresh narrator adds something to what he has heard.

First appearance deceives many.

Skilled in every trick, a worthy heir of his paternal craft, he would make black look like white, and white look black.

Those things that nature denied to human sight, she revealed to the eyes of the soul.

The rest who does not know?

Many women long for what eludes them, and like not what is offered them.

How little you know about the age you live in if you think that honey is sweeter than cash in hand.

Judgement of beauty can err, what with the wine and the dark.

We are slow to believe that which if believed would hurt our feelings.

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.

The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.

We can only cope with the dangers of language if we recognize that language is by nature magical and therefore highly dangerous.

If people say the world we perceive is a 'construct' of our brains, they are saying in effect, that it results from an inveterate habit of thought. Why does it never occur to them that a habit is something you can overcome, if you set about it with enough energy?

Therefore it is only people living in the same period and, broadly speaking, in the same community, who inhabit the same world. People living in other periods, or even at the same period but in a totally different community, do not inhabit the same world about which they have different ideas, they inhabit different worlds altogether.

Understanding what another human being says to us is always a matter of translation.

When a new thing or a new idea comes into the consciousness of the community, it is described, not by a new word, but by the name of the pre-existing object which most closely resembles it.

Wordsworth's called The Tables Turned: Sweet is the lore which nature brings: Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things— We murder to dissect.