Quotes About Perception

Our lives are like lace, appearing unbelievably complicated and mixed up to others. It is essential to remember that your life has to make meaning only to you.

At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.

Indeed there may be more: a chorus of me, the observed and the observers.

Children are born pantheists. They see reality unshaped by culture or language. The whole world seems divine to them, full of mystery and power.

We are conscious observers of the universe. Even if the universe as a whole possesses no consciousness, we do. In this sense we can be said to be a part of the consciousness of the universe, or of its self-consciousness.

Research by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman upends the idea that beliefs determine what we do or what we can do. It is the opposite. Beliefs do not change our actions. Actions change our beliefs.

One perception of the way he lived his life has always had the capacity to stir up complex things, to make us uneasy, defensive, secretly troubled about our own less glamorous and more sedentary lives. A characteristic Hemingway letter: the streams of loose syntax, the blunt emotion. The way I see all this is that part of what we do in this life is conscious. And the rest of it is unconscious. Maybe this is the best we can ever say.

The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have — and that is a moral problem, not an economic one.

This music, transmitted by loud-speakers, made a masterpiece appear like an amateurish attempt at composition by nimcompoop

Hypocrites,' replied Cale, 'I've come across a lot of them recently. I mean by that I understand now how many of them there are.

Think of how strange the colours and sights of the world would be for a blind man abruptly made to see or a man deaf from birth hearing the playing of a hundred flutes

Whatever discoveries have been made in the land of self-delusion, many undiscovered regions remain to be explored.

Ser sociable es muy arriesgado, incluso fatal, porque supone estar en contacto con personas, la mayor parte de las cuales son aburridas, perversas o ignorantes, y sólo lo buscan a uno porque no soportan su propia compañía. La mayor parte se aburren a sí mismos y reciben a los demás no como a verdaderos amigos, sino como una distracción...

Cuanto más viejo me hago más propenso a creer que si el amor ha de juzgarse por sus efectos visibles, se parece más al odio que a la amistad.

Intelligence has many shades, but rage is the same colour everywhere. Humiliation tastes the same to everyone.

Como muchos hombres inteligentes, cree que los demás son idiotas.

Don't think of it as a lie, think of it as the truth under imaginary circumstances.

É um dos grandes erros da pessoa culta: ter como adquirido que, por possuir uma mente sofisticada, possui também emoções sofisticadas".

No news is ever as good or as bad as it first seems

A vida é como um lago para onde uma criança ociosa atira uma pedrinha e, a partir desse ato, as ondas espalham-se para o exterior. Errado. A vida é um ribeiro: não uma torrente de água a galgar as margens, apenas um ribeirinho vulgar e insignificante, com os redemoinhos, turbilhões e vórtices normais [...]

I have always liked what the Scarecrow said to Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. "Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't they?

The past doesn't change, does it?" "It's still there, same as it ever was. But we see it differently as we get older.

What is the mass of a feeling? What is its wavelength, its position on the electromagnetic spectrum?

Your so-called "self" is a composite superimposed on the activity of many competing subpersonalities or agents. What you perceive as your consciousness is a string of temporary heroes rising above those they have defeated. And so you seek out heroes in the common story of your race.