Perception Quotes

It was tough sitting in jail listening to Jay Leno and Rush Limbaugh and everybody making jokes about me getting shot. And watching the media report all kinds of lies about me, like that I got raped in jail. That never happened. But at least while I was locked down, all the inmates gave me props encouragement, and so did lots of mothers and kids, who wrote me letters of support.

I have often thought it would be a blessing if each human being were stricken blind and deaf for a few days during their early adult life. Darkness would make them more appreciative of sight; silence would teach them the joys of sound.

Real vision is the ability to see the invisible.

In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.

I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.

Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.

Opinions about obviousness are to a certain extent a function of time.

In the studio, we adhere to a strict colour code. Developed over decades, the colour code consists of a finite and precise colour palate... The whole world as we experience it comes to us through the mystic realm of colour.

The trouble is, we've been taught what to see and how to render what we see. If only we could be in the position of those men who did those wonderful drawings in Lascaux and Altimira!

Every reminiscence is colored by the way things are today, and therefore by a delusive point of view.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

Take from a man his reputation for probity, and the more shrewd and clever he is, the more hated and mistrusted he becomes.

A man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental woman.

I'll be darned!" said Douglas. "I never thought of that. That's brilliant! It's true. Old people never were children!" "And it's kind of sad," said Tom, sitting still."There's nothing we can do to help them.

Whoever is loved is beautiful, but the opposite is not true, that whoever is beautiful is loved.

And this do I call immaculate perception of all things: to want nothing else from them, but to be allowed to lie before them as a mirror with a hundred facets.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

There are some faults which, when well managed, make a greater figure than virtue itself.

Whether or not you can observe a thing depends upon the theory you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

Our impatience of miles, when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards.

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.

Some people say, the world can be so alive! It always is, you just do not know it because of the screen of your thinking. You notice it as you become more awake.

Remember this maxim: When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. The way you perceive things is an extremely powerful tool that will allow you to fully bring the power of intention into your life.

Words are mere sound and smoke, dimming the heavenly light.

The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.

Guys are simple... women are not simple and they always assume that men must be just as complicated as they are, only way more mysterious. The whole point is guys are not thinking much. They are just what they appear to be. Tragically.

... No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody - hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the weakest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and the fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom.

To the sober person adventurous conduct often seems insanity.

In spite of how things may appear to us, we are never trapped by where we are. The trap is always who we are

Tragedy turns into comedy when you watch your own drama and realizing it as a mind-created fiction designed to create you a sense of identity.

The moon does not simply disappear when we are not looking at it.

Every form correctly seen is beautiful

The thing is, in America, it just seemed ridiculous - I mean, the idea of having a hit record over there, ... It was just something you could never do.

The man who occupies the first place seldom plays the principal part.

We falsely attribute to men a determined character - putting together all their yesterdays - and averaging them - we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support - it is worse than a large family - he is the silent poor indeed.

Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

I say that the power of vision extends through the visual rays to the surface of non-transparent bodies, while the power possessed by these bodies extends to the power of vision.

My own eyes are not enough for me...I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many is not enough...I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee. More gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.

The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say; 'I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.

My heart is so small it's almost invisible. How can You place such big sorrows in it? "Look," He answered, "your eyes are even smaller, yet they behold the world.

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.

A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspend their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet.

Men in all ways are better than they seem.

I don't like to see things on purpose. I like them to soak in. A friend . . . asked me to go to the top of the Empire State Building once, and I told him that he shouldn't treat New York as a sight-it's feeling, an emotional experience. And the same with every place else.

Whatever happens, whatever you experience, feel, think, do - it's always now. It's all there is. And if you continuously miss the now - resist it, dislike it, try to get away from it, reduce it to a means to an end, then you miss the essence of your life, and you are stuck in a dream world of images, concepts, labels, interpretations, judgments - the conditioned content of your mind that you take to be yourself.

Painting is concerned with the ten things you can see: these are darkness and brightness, substance and color, form and place, remoteness and nearness, movement and rest.

Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad.

Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

When the charge first came up, I hated black women. Then, going to trial, I started seeing the black women that was helping me. It's mostly black female guards. They treat me with human respect.

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back and they won't be false, and they won't be true but they'll be real

Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast

I learned to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society.

This is what they all come to who exclusively harp on experience. They do not stop to consider that experience is only one half of experience.

The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

The real moment of success is not the moment apparent to the crowd.