Quotes About Perception

if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you.

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

In a room with many windows some thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.

The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look… To form the intention of new awareness is already to transform and be transformed.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

Wherever the gaze rests, art will draw it also elsewhere, will remind that there is always more. Alice does not stop and face her own reflection in the looking-glass: she travels through it.

In one recorded dialogue with a student, Bash? instructed, "The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective." "Don't you mean too subjective or too objective?" his student asked. Bash? answered, simply, "No.

Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?

All writers recognize this surge of striking; in its energies the objects of the world are made new, alchemized by their passage through the imaginal, musical, world-foraging and word-forging mind. This altered vision is the secret happiness of poems, of poets. It is as if the poem encounters the world and finds in it a hidden language, a Braille unreadable except when raised by the awakened imaginative mind.

One useful way to approach a haiku is to understand each of its parts as pointing toward both world and self. Read this way, haiku remind that a person should not become too fixed in a singular sense of what the self might consist of or know, or where it might reside.

An hour is not a house" An hour is not a house, a life is not a house, you do not go through them as if they were doors to another. Yet an hour can have shape and proportion, four walls, a ceiling. An hour can be dropped like a glass. Some want quiet as others want bread. Some want sleep. My eyes went to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

It doesn't matter what they will make of you or your days: they will be wrong, they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man, all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention. Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad, you slept, you awakened.

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R. P. Blackmur said.

Plants, stones, utensils, each thing has its individual feelings, similar to those of men," Bash? wrote.

Un giorno è sconfinato Un giorno è sconfinato Fino a mezzogiorno Poi è andato L'acqua del laghetto di ieri m'intreccia ancora i capelli Non so che ora è Impossibile capirlo Ma possibile rinunciarvi p#159

There is no dwelling in past, present or future and one is able to see the world without any pre-conceptions.

We are preoccupied with the past, which has already happened, and we are pre-occupied about the future, which does not yet exist. We worry about what will happen and we think about various things that make us feel anxious, frustrated, passionate, angry, resentful, afraid. While we are so preoccupied, our awareness of the here-and-now slips by and we hardly notice its passing. We eat without tasting, we look without seeing and live without ever perceiving what is real.

We treat illness with resentment as though it is a total betrayal, and our bodies become an enemy. Old age is seen as something that happens to other people, and death is treated like rumour that may or may not be true.

Reality is bizarre enough for me.

Is she become a rag doll? Are the wolves become children? It seems quite possible, there on the twilight fringes of dying. With some faint spark of herself, the little girl holds on to the idea. Even a rag doll has more life than does a dying child.

Are you prepared then, to shoot a human being?" he asked, trying not to let Jenny sense his own internal unease. "It's not the same as shooting a duck or gazelle." Jenny's violet eyes met his straight on. "If that human being was about to harm any one of us, I'd feel worse about shooting the duck. It, at least, would have done nothing to deserve a bullet.

What if the only non-humans the two-legs know," she mused, "are the Cousin-kind? How stupid they would believe all others who walk the earth to be!

His features, like those of his cousin Norvin Norwood, were aquiline rather than handsome, but unlike Norvin, whose grey eyes seemed to hold something of a raptor's fierceness, Jared's similar visage was mild.

Well, then why should we do anything more than once? Should I just smoke this one cigarette? Maybe we should only have sex once, if it's the same thing. Should we just watch one sunset? Or live just one day? Because it's new every time. Each time is a different experience.