Quotes About Perception

The enthusiasm of geese for high water is a subtle thing, and might be overlooked by those unfamiliar with goose gossip...

SOME PAINTINGS become famous because, being durable, they are viewed by successive generations, in each of which are likely to be found a few appreciative eyes. I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all, except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush, and it is the same river who, before I can bring my friends to view his work, erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in the mind's eye.

The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.

When the logic of history hungers for bread and we hand out a stone, we are at pains to explain how much the stone resembles bread.

Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another

To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons.

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and madmen.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subltly and feel nobly.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have always been devided as fools and madmen.

To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance - did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.

We participate in a tragedy at a comedy we only look.

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

Someone responding to intuition, to chance and fortune, often can't explain himself well.

We don't know where numbers come from or why they have the properties they do, unless you believe that they are a system invented by humans based on the ways in which we apprehend the world, a creation of our thinking and therefore our neurology.

I consider exercise vulgar. It makes people smell.