Perception Quotes - Page 5

The modern tendency towards increasing specialization in all branches of research and scholarship has discouraged comparative studies of the arts; and what we seldom do we generally distrust. But our distrust of analogies was not shared by the sixteenth century, which inherited from antiquity a habit of drawing parallels as a matter of course.

Amongst all the colours in this multicoloured world, even jet black has its reserved place.

Priyavrat Thareja

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite.

But, then, the truest perceptions of life, for me at least, have always proved to be the most elusive and the most shortlived

For until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms - as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music, as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses, in nature, of Wordsworth's 'something far more deeply interfused'; as systematic silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an 'obscure knowledge'. But now I knew contemplation at its height.

I am often told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but also there can be no reason to assume that the result of doing it in these times will give us the balanced picture it gave in Dante's. Dante lived in the thirteenth century, when that balance was achieved by the faith of his age. We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself.

Flannery O'Connor

I'd rather be judged on what I can do instead of who I'm not.

His face had been twisted into an expression of every agony he had imagined for his friend.

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. At the edge of perception, weird things dance and howl.

I brought a picture with me that I had at home, of a girl in a swing with a castle and pretty blue bubbles in the background, to hang in my room, but that nurse here said the girl was naked from the waist up and not appropriate. You know, I've had that picture for fifty years and I never knew she was naked. If you ask me, I don't think the old men they've got here can see well enough to notice that she's bare-breasted. But, this is a Methodist home, so she's in the closet with my gallstones.

To analyze or assess a person's failings or deficiencies,' he declared to himself, 'is useless, not because such blemishes are immovable, but because they affect the mass of beholders in diverse ways. Different minds perceive utterly variant figures in the same being.

[A]s military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan.

An hour later we were walking past rows of busy beach huts and weaving between sunbathers and Frisbee games. I was surprised that people weren't taking more notice of us. Everyone looked so strange to me that I couldn't believe I didn't look equally strange to them.

Perceiving the world as well designed and thus the product of a designer, and even seeing divine providence in the daily affairs of life, may be the product of a brain adapted to finding patterns in nature. (38)

Michael Shermer

There is no single thing... that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says 'I am more than just my appearance'. If each object quivers with readiness to imply something other than itself, if each perception is a word in a poem dense with connotations, then the poet's selection of any given subject of speculation will become... a means of attuning himself to the rhythms and harmonies of reality at large. ... The notion of a network of correspondence is not an outmoded Romantic illusion: it represents a crucial intuition...

A blind man sees with his cane, like all the rest of us.

Great men look greater than yesterday.

Toba Beta

It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of his victim to become a real test for him; since he had quite put it to himself from the first that, oh distinctly! he could "cultivate" his whole perception. He had felt it as above all open to cultivation--which indeed was but another name for his manner of spending his time. He was bringing it on, bringing it to perfection, by practice; in consequence of which it had grown so fine that he was now aware of impressions, attestations of his general postulate, that couldn't have broken upon him at once.

What matters finally is how we feel about ourselves. After all, to a worm we're just food.

Nothing iseternal.Everything elseis not.

The whole world had given up on love anyway and clung instead to its malformed cousins: lust, narcissism, self-interest.

Just remember that in most things, right or wrong depends on where you’re standing at the moment. My father’s people would have thought having your life’s mate picked out for you by your parents to be … well, barbaric.” As Talon’s expression started to darken, Caleb added, “No offense intended, but I’m pointing out that things look the way they do because that is how you were taught as a child. And the rest of the world is vastly different from what a child can imagine.

Raymond E. Feist

When he passed me in the restaurant," he said at last, "I had a curious impression. It was as though a wild animal – an animal savage, but savage! you understand – had passed me by.""And yet he looked altogether of the most respectable.""Précisément! The body – the cage – is everything of the most respectable – but through the bars, the wild animal looks out.""You are fanciful, mon vieux," said M. Bouc. "It may be so. But I could not rid myself of the impression that evil had passed me by very close." (1.2.52-56)

Agatha Christie

Within weeks of my arrival in New York, I was someone else, not because there had been a revolution in my psychological makeup or any trauma. It was simply this: people saw me in a light in which I had never been seen before.

But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.

One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.” He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate.The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community—then it may not be seen as a trauma. The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it resides in the event’s psychological construal. It’s for this reason, Bonanno told me, that “stressful” or “traumatic” events in and of themselves don’t have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. “The prospective epidemiological data shows that exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning,” he said. “It’s only predictive if there’s a negative response.” In other words, living through adversity, be it endemic to your environment or an acute negative event, doesn’t guarantee that you’ll suffer going forward. What matters is whether that adversity becomes traumatizing.

Maria Konnikova

There is nothing called as truth, it's just your new perception

Harrish Sairaman

Abbey relaxed, grateful not only that someone had thought to throw a party for her, but that she had been able to escape attending.

Emily Ann Benedict

[she used to say that] each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world – like a bride wears on her wedding day—except this kind of veil is invisible. we walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. the world is kind of blurry. we like it that way. but sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments – like there’s a wind blowing it from our faces – and when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. we see all the beauty and cruelty and sadness and love, but mostly we are happy not to. some people learn to lift the veils themselves. then they don’t have to depend on the wind anymore. ...it’s just her way of saying that most of the time people get distracted by little stuff, and ignore the big stuff.

You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your perception...you see what is, where most people see what they expect.

Tsitsi Dangarembga

How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.

Perception is subjective.

Toba Beta

Internal mental experience is not the product of a photographic process. Internal reality is in fact constructed by the brain as it interacts with the environment in the present, in the context of its past experiences and expectancies of the future. At the level of perceptual categorizations, we have reached a land of mental representations quite distant from the layers of the world just inches away from their place inside the skull. This is the reason why each of us experiences a unique way of minding the world. (pp. 166-167)

Daniel J. Siegel

You can see a rose both in two ways. First, through its beautiful petals. The other, through its thorns

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.

Marilynne Robinson

The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.

When your heart truly adores somebody, your mind perceives a halo on that man's head.

Toba Beta

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

Even if you have not awakened, if you realize that your perceptions and activities are all like dreams and you view them with detachment, not giving rise to grasping and rejecting discrimination, then this is virtually tantamount to awakening from the dream.

I walked home, seeing all my doubt from the other side. Have you ever seen that? Like when you go on holiday. On the way back, everything is the same but it looks a little different than it did on the way. It's because you're seeing it backwards.

Here's something else I'd like your opinion about," I said. "If he went back underground and sat down again in the same spot, wouldn't the sudden transition from the sunlight mean that his eyes would be overwhelmed by darkness?" "Certainly," he replied. "Now, the process of adjustment would be quite long this time, and suppose that before his eyes had settled down and while he wasn't seeing well, he had once again to compete against those same old prisoners at identifying those shadows. Would he make a fool of himself? Wouldn't they say that he'd come back from his upward journey with his eyes ruined, and that it wasn't even worth trying to go up there? And would they -- if they could -- grab hold of anyone who tried to set them free and take them up there and kill him?

Plato

You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.

Stubborness and staunch, they are both same thingsfrom different point of view, such crazy and eccentric.

Toba Beta

When our poor, faultily sensitive vision can perceive a thing, we say that it is visible. When the nerves of touch can feel it, we say that it is tangible. Yet I tell you there are beings intangible to our physical sense, yet whose presence is felt by the spirit, and invisible to our eyes merely because those organs are not attuned to the light as reflected from their bodies. But light passed through the screen, which we are about to use has a wavelength novel to the scientific world, and by it you shall see with the eyes of the flesh that which has been invisible since life began. Have no fear! ("Unseen - Unfeared")

Francis Stevens

What is seen by mind, is an environmental image that projected by public consciousness in vicinity.

Toba Beta

With growing disbelief, Jess yet again felt herself slipping into the gap - that gap of perception between what is really happening to a person and what others think is happening.

Attending church does not necessarily mean living the principles taught in those meeting. You can be active in a church but inactive in its gospel.

Stephen R. Covey

Shallan’s mental image of Jasnah Kholin was of someone almost divine. It was, upon reflection, an odd way to regard a determined atheist.

Brandon Sanderson

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

You used," he said, and then took a sharp breath, "to call me Augustus.

A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?I make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true.

Terry Pratchett

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend

One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.

Anne Rice

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.

Simone de Beauvoir

We all see only that which we are trained to see.

Robert Anton Wilson

The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

Mignon McLaughlin

Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.""I don't believe in ghosts," I said, faintly."Some people can't see the color red. That doesn't mean it isn't there," she replied.

That is certainly one way to look at the matter. There are others.

Patricia C. Wrede

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