Perception Quotes

“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, Nervous Conditions

“How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“Silence is a lie that screams at the light.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“all appears to change when we change”
― Henri-Frédéric Amiel

“As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you’re a kid again, poking around in your parents’ closet, only this time there’s no chance of getting in trouble, so you don’t have to be so sure that everything gets put back exactly where it was before you did your poking around. Still, you hope to find something, or maybe you fear finding something, that will completely change your conception of the parent you thought you knew.”
― Roz Chast

“When your heart truly adores somebody,
your mind perceives a halo on that man's head.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“What do you see when you look at me?”

My eyes narrowed and I pressed my lips together, weighing my thoughts. All of his bimbo admirers aside, what did I see? What did my gut tell me about this man? What did it say that allowed me to wind up here with him, under such impulsive circumstances?

“You’re a sad man,” I swallowed. “You’re arrogant and set in your ways, but that creates a fortress for you. It’s your safe haven. Behind the moat is someone who has lost something he loved, only I’m not sure what, or who. You’re afraid of something and your loyalty is hidden away in a cell, wounded by betrayal.” I rested my head on the pillow. “That’s what I see.”

“On second thought,” he exhaled, letting his head drop next to mine. “You’re psychic.”
― Rachael Wade, Preservation

“Mostly you are what they think you are.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Essays

“My point in mentioning this is only to say that people who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you're just quietly going about a life of your own choosing. They make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases, can be a severe distraction and a waste of time. This is a thing I wish I had understood much earlier than I did.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. "This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older," Eagleman said--why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.”
― Burkhard Bilger

“Christ delves far beyond the means of superficiality, not simply because of his immaculate love, but also because he considers the distinct cases of each individual rather than withholding a broadened perception by use of stereotypes.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“Perception is subjective.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Some prisons don't require bars to keep people locked inside. All it takes is their perception that they belong there.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Unglued: Making Wise Choices in the Midst of Raw Emotions

“If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.”
― Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

“I think one can tell a lot about a person from the way he chooses to let the stub of his cigarette burn out...”
― Sanhita Baruah

“No perspective, no perception.
New perspective, new perception.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Perception is the lie that we convince ourselves exists”
― Melissa Bradley

“Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“When we're in the story, when we're part of it, we can't know the outcome. It's only later that we think we can see what the story was. But do we ever really know? And does anybody else, perhaps, coming along a little later, does anybody else really care? ... History is written by the survivors, but what is that history? That's the point I was trying to make just now. We don't know what the story is when we're in it, and even after we tell it we're not sure. Because the story doesn't end.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“We both know that, my friend, but a man's perception soon becomes his reality.”
― Tim LaHaye, Nicolae

“Perception can be one-sided or variant: "Glass half empty or half full." There usually is more than one way of perceiving. Thoroughly check your inner dialogue.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence

“There is something about the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to appreciate it as pure form, regardless of the kinds of traits traditionally regarded as imperfections. In a figure drawing class, an obese woman's folds of flesh take on a kind of beauty. You can look at a man's shrunken chest or legs or buttocks with tenderness. Age is not ugly, just poignant.”
― Joyce Maynard, The Good Daughters

“Two people can illustrate crudity to you.
The first is the crude man, whom you see perceiving the diamond as a stone.
The other is the refined man, who makes clear to you the crudity of the first one.”
― Idries Shah, Reflections

“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.”
― Markus Zusak, Underdog

“A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger. A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“There are all degrees of proficiency in the use men make of this instructive world where we are boarded and schooled and apprenticed. It is sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three degrees of progress.

One class lives to the utility of the symbol, as the majority of men do, regarding health and wealth as the chief good. Another class live about this mark to the beauty of the symbol; as the poet and artist and the sensual school in philosophy. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified and these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the third spiritual perception.

I see in society the neophytes of all these classes, the class especially of young men who in their best knowledge of the sign have a misgiving that there is yet an unattained substance and they grope and sigh and aspire long in dissatisfaction, the sand-blind adorers of the symbol meantime chirping and scoffing and trampling them down. I see moreover that the perfect man - one to a millennium - if so many, traverses the whole scale and sees and enjoys the symbol solidly; then also has a clear eye for its beauty; and lastly wears it lightly as a robe which he can easily throw off, for he sees the reality and divine splendor of the inmost nature bursting through each chink and cranny.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II: 1836-1838

“It is far easier to make a good first impression than to change a bad one.”
― Michelle Tillis Lederman, The 11 Laws of Likability: Relationship Networking . . . Because People Do Business with People They Like

“I don't exactly get to be moody or snappy when I don't feel like putting on a happy face, because when most people meet me, I'm already starting out with a deficit. Fat girls don't get that luxury.”
― Julie Murphy, Puddin'