Quotes About Perception

Not to be taken in is something Père Goriot as a whole teaches: it's about learning to see the world as it is, not as it claims to be.

everything," Balzac claims, "is a mosaic.

We need novels in order to enter the minds of others. But that project can run up against the opacities of other minds and spirits. When a man tells us of a woman's desiring, we should beware of blindness.

Balzac's semiotics is all about detection, the need to discover who people really are.

somos todos ignorantes, só que sobre coisas diferentes", como observou o romancista e humorista norte-americano Mark Twain em um de seus numerosos aforismos sobre o assunto.

We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions. In this way, narrative and memory become one.

There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don't know.

When it comes to learning, what we choose to do is guided by our judgments of what works and what doesn't, and we are easily misled.

Humans do not give greater credence to an objective record of a past event than to their subjective remembering of it, and we are surprisingly insensitive to the ways our particular construals of a situation are unique to ourselves. Thus the narrative of memory becomes central to our intuitions regarding the judgments we make and the actions we take. 5

The paradox is that those students who employ the least effective study strategies overestimate their learning the most and, as a consequence of their misplaced confidence, they are not inclined to change their habits.

I hate when people say 'I see'. It doesn't mean anything and I think it's hostile. Whenever anyone tells me 'I see' I think they're really saying 'Fuck you'.

I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I'm thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish.

I always looked forward to being an adult, because I thought the adult world was, well—adult. That adults weren't cliquey or nasty, that the whole notion of being cool, or in, or popular would case to be the arbiter of all things social, but I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood.

One man's nonsense is another man's sense.

Most people think things are not real unless they are spoken, that it's the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, that legitimizes it. I suppose this is why people always want other people to say "I love you." I think just the opposite—that thoughts are realest when thought, that expressing them distorts or dilutes them.

Odio quando qualcuno dice «Capisco». Non significa nulla ed è vagamente aggressivo. Ogni volta che lo sento in realtà mi suona come un «Vaffanculo».

I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought.

American men are so embarrassed about napping," she said. "They think it is some sort of feminine indulgence. I detest a man who can't nap.

We believe in what we cannot know or understand. We do not believe in what we know.

She understood as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling - until now - had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, but he did not let on about his deafness.

however she was a woman and I'd have more luck conjuring up the thoughts of a chinaman than I would figuring out what she was conspiring

A cormorant broke the surface, like an improbable idea tearing the membrane between dreams and life.

It's perfectly possible to enjoy a good, civilized, person-to-person conversation with a picture on a museum wall. Talk to it, listen carefully, and it will more than likely talk back to you.