Quotes About Perception

You can put down a bad book; you can avoid listening to bad music; but you cannot miss the ugly tower block opposite your house.

Don't dwell on reality it will only keep you from greatness.

Mr. Happiness is an illusion created by pharmaceutical companies.

Only the man that knows to little, knows too much." Nero Wolfe

Nothing is obvious in itself. Obviousness is subjective.

She had been a pleasant surprise. From what her father had said I had expected an intellectual treat in a plain wrapper, but the package was attractive enough to take your attention off of the contents....she was not in any way hard to look at, and those details which had been first disclosed when she appeared in her swimming rig were completely satisfactory.

but I had long since learned from Wolfe that the corner the light doesn't reach is the one the dime rolled to.

To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.

I had been wrong about him Tuesday when I figured that he had always been fifty years old and always would be. He had already put on at least five years, and he had shrunk. Instead of tagging him a neat little squirt I would now call him a magnified beetle.

The trouble with an alarm clock is that what seems sensible when you set it seems absurd when it goes off.

When an international financier is confronted by a holdup man with a gun, he automatically hands over not only his money and jewelry but also his shirt and pants, because it doesn't occur to him that a robber might draw the line somewhere.

It would take an extremely unattractive person to think of that." --Nero Wolfe, on the plot of "Cordially Invited to Meet Death" by Rex Stout, p. 159 of 192

Nevertheless, it was not necessary to assume, as Wolfe had in the case of Viola Duday, that if he had killed Priscilla Eads he had probably done so by contrivance and not by perpetration. In spite of his pure white hair and wrinkled old skin, I would have bet, from the way he looked and moved and held his shoulders and head, that he could still have chinned himself up to five or six times.

I decided that the only way to keep feminine intuition from sneaking through an occasional lucky stab was to stay away from women altogether, which wasn't practical.

I gathered that with the men the consensus was that women were okay in their place, which I guess was the way cavemen felt about it, and all their male descendants. The question was, and still is, what's their place?

No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.

Saul Panzer stood facing the cast, not the audience. There is nothing impressive about Saul. He is undersized, his nose and ears are too big, and his shoulders slant. With Saul a thousand wrongdoers had made the mistake of believing what they saw. He spoke. "I believe this is the way it was Thursday evening when Mr. Wolfe entered. Does anyone disagree?

To anyone seeing him but not knowing him, Saul Panzer was nothing but a little guy with a big nose who never quite caught up with his shaving.

She marched across to his desk, extended a hand, and told him cordially, "You look exactly right! Just as I thought! I would—" She broke it off because she was getting a deep freeze. He had moved no muscle, and the expression on his face, while not belligerent, was certainly not cordial. She drew back. He spoke. "I don't shake hands with you because you might later think it an imposition. We'll see. Sit down, Miss Eads.

I looked at the woman next to Bernard Quest on his left. She was middle-aged, with a scrawny neck and dominating ears, and was unquestionably a rugged individualist, since no lipstick had been allowed anywhere near her.

Being a lover of beauty, I permitted myself occasional glances at her profile, and observed that her chin was even better from that angle than from the front. Of course there was an off chance that she was a murderess, but you can't have everything

Subtlety chases the obvious up a never-ending spiral and never quite catches it.

Probably no man will ever corral truth, but Protagoras came closer to it than Plato.

With everybody. Lots of them don't know it. Most of them up here wouldn't say that word, nigger, but they've got that word in them. Everybody. It's in them buried somewhere, but it's not dead. Some of them don't know they've got it and they wouldn't believe it, but it's there. That's what I knew I'd have to face when I sat there on the bed last night and tried to decide what to do.