Quotes About Perception

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even though but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs

It was horrible of a young girl to let herself be talked about; however unfounded the charges against her, she must be to blame for their having been made.

It's more real to me here than if I went up, he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.

All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches.

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.

If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.

There is a sort of gloss upon ingenious falsehoods that dazzles the imagination, but which neither belongs to, nor becomes the sober aspect of truth.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing. – Edmund Burke

But let it be considered that hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing. A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea.

Who ever said we ought to love a fine woman, or even any of these beautiful animals which please us? Here to be affected, there is no need of the concurrence of our will.

_Stulti est dixisse, Non putaram_.

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

At this rate, he felt, he might even live to see the day when novelists described their characters by some other device than that of manoeuvring them into examining themselves in mirrors.

Intellect stood aside and informed him of this fact.

It's hard to evaluate the validity of a belief you're scarcely aware of—you just accept it as is.

Imaginatively challenged folks, for whom crossing a state line amounted to foreign travel, could not conceive that the gray-blue-eyes inspecting them had, over the past year, similarly scrutinized Nandi warriors, Arab mullahs, Magyar landowners, French marshals, Prussian academics, and practically every monarch or minister of consequence in Europe--not to mention the maquettes in Rodin's studio, and whatever dark truths flickered in the gaze of dying lions.

Well, we seem to have it.

What I cannot understand about the Russian," Roosevelt complained, "is the way he will lie when he knows perfectly well that you know he is lying.

It has been objected that I am a boy," said Roosevelt wearily—he had been hearing the charge for years—"but I can only offer the time-honored reply, that years will cure me of that." He

to manufacture sensations.

Much like to the mole in Æsopes fable, that, being blynd her selfe, would in no wise be perswaded that any beast could see.

And later times thinges more vnknowne shall show. Why then should witlesse man so much misweene That nothing is but that which he hath seene? What if within the Moones fayre shining sphere, What if in euery other starre vnseene Of other worldes he happily should heare?

All this world's glory seemeth vain to me, And all their shows but shadows, saving she.

You're universally liked because you're such a black hole in space. You don't have any real traits. You're sympa , at least as much as a narcissist can be, but that means nothing. You're beautiful and everybody projects onto you what they're looking for, which is easy to do since you don't stand for anything definite. You're a black hole in space.