Quotes About Perception

NEXT EXIT, and know I was home. Shit, I missed that sign. And what are cities really, besides signs and arbitrary boundaries?

instead of simply saying, "A rabbi, a priest, and a black guy walk into a bar," he'd say, "The subjects of this joke are three males, two of whom are clergymen, one of the Jewish faith, the other an ordained Catholic minister. The religion of the African-American respondent is undetermined, as is his educational level. The setting for the joke is a licensed establishment where alcohol is served. No, wait. It's a plane.

Don't tell me Kinshasa, the poorest city in the poorest country in the world, a place where the average per capita income is one goat bell, two bootleg Michael Jackson cassette tapes, and three sips of potable water per year, thinks we're too poor to associate with.

Foy was no Tree of Knowledge, at most he was a Bush of Opinion

People eat the shit you shovel them.

Hereos. Idols. They're never who you think they are. Shorter. Nastier. Smellier. And when you finally meet them, there's something that makes you want to choke the shit out of them.

I don't care if you're black, white, brown, yellow, red, green, or purple.' We've all said it. Posited as proof of our nonprejudicial ways, but if you painted any one of us purple or green, we'd be mad as hell.

Politics is show business for ugly people.

The Swiss are the only nation to make the Germans appear inefficient, the French undiplomatic and the Texans poor.

if God was a woman, she wouldn't have screwed things up this badly.

If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do.

And it isn't a mistake in taste, like believing that the Matrix sequels were as good as the original.

Marsh recounts an anecdote about a psychopath who was being tested with a series of pictures and who failed over and over again to recognize fearful expressions, until finally she figured it out: "That's the look people get right before I stab them.

Forgery is just the most dramatic example of the importance of origin. Arthur Koestler described a friend who owned a drawing that she first took to be a reproduction. When she later discovered that it was an original by Picasso, she displayed it more prominently, claimed that she saw it differently, and enjoyed it more. For her, its value went up.

When people remembered incidents in which they were the perpetrator, they often described the harmful act as minor and done for good reasons. When they remembered incidents in which they were the victims, they were more likely to describe the action as significant, with long-lasting effects, and motivated by some combination of irrationality and sadism. Our own acts that upset others are innocent or forced; the acts that others do to upset us are crazy or cruel.

Gopnik compares baby consciousness to that of an adult dumped into the middle of a foreign city, totally overwhelmed, constantly turning to see new things, struggling to make sense of it all. Things are even worse for a baby, actually, because even the most stressed-out adult can choose to think of something else: we can look forward to getting back to the hotel; imagine how we would describe our trip to friends; fantasize, daydream, or pray. The baby just is, trapped in the here and now.

But that's just me. Others see things differently. My point here is just that the failure of people to attend to data in the political domain does not reflect a limitation in their capacity for reason. It reflects how most people make sense of politics. They don't care about truth because, for them, it's not really about truth.

The myth of pure evil has many sources. One is what Steven Pinker calls "the moralization gap"—the tendency to diminish the severity of our own acts relative to the acts of others.

Paul Rozin's discoveries that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. As Tamar Gendler points out, the mind works on two tracks. We know, consciously, that the bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty, and yet we can't help blurring the imagined and reality; our minds scream, "Dangerous object! Stay away!

Most relevant for the purposes here, one lucky accident of this feature of memory is that pain-then-pleasure is recalled as better than pleasure-then-pain. Because of this, even if the amount of pain, taken in isolation, is the same as the amount of pleasure, if the pain comes first, the distortions of memory decrease the pain and increase the pleasure, improving the whole experience.

The duration of felt experience—our feeling of right now—is between two and three seconds, about how long it takes Paul McCartney to sing the words "Hey Jude." Everything before this is memory; everything after is anticipation. So what about a life dedicated entirely to improving this moving window of two to three seconds?

The literary critic Helen Vendler writes that "treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.

I believe this in part because of Paul Rozin's discoveries that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. As Tamar Gendler points out, the mind works on two tracks. We know, consciously, that the bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty, and yet we can't help blurring the imagined and reality; our minds scream, "Dangerous object! Stay away!

Further, spotlights only illuminate what they are pointed at, so empathy reflects our biases.