Quotes About Perception

serial killings were something else—something that happened only in America, like unemployment and homelessness and corruption—the kind of things that they showed you on the television news or that you read about in the international pages of Pravda.

Everything I've ever told you, including this, is a lie.

Her eyes gleamed as bright with genius as any worthy man's

Grandiose patients often imagine that we know more about them than we do.

YOU SEE THEM SOMETIMES. They're just out of the corner of your eye, when you're not expecting them, and sometimes if you close your eyes very, very tightly, and open them quickly, there will be a quick flash of them behind your eyelids before they dissipate. They are the echoes of deja vu, they are the regrets that are fleeting, they are that which you didn't know you missed... They are everywhere and nowhere.

Once again I felt light-headed, but this time it wasn't from the scent of lilacs; it was from the scent of my own death.

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.

Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.

The murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums.

The superficial and the slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization.

The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.

The real reason that language so often carries magic is because humans have trouble not ascribing special power to it. Language makes so many things happen. If we say or write words in a certain way, we can make people see things that aren't there and feel things they have no reason to feel—all this with mere mouth sounds or paper marks.

Certainly for many people the most intense music is the music of the spheres—the perception of built-in coherence in nature—and that is the music of pure ideas. We

The real reason that language so often carries magic is because humans have trouble not ascribing special power to it.

I think part of what it means for God to "reveal" himself is to keep us guessing, to come to terms with the idea that knowing God is also a form of not knowing God, of knowing that we cannot fully know, but only catch God in part—which is more than enough to keep us busy.

reality isn't what it used to be.

We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

Reading the situation—not simply the Bible—is what wisdom is all about.

That Jesus was not and could not have been understood by walking with Jesus in and around Galilee. The disciples themselves—those Jesus handpicked to carry on his work—were utterly clueless about the big picture.

We are all culturally embedded creatures—we can never untangle ourselves from our here and now. We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.