Perception Quotes

One man is more concerned with the impression he makes on the rest of mankind, another with the impression the rest of mankind makes on him.

Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.

When you look at a tree and perceive its stillness, you become still yourself. You connect with it at a very deep level. You feel a oneness with whatever you perceive in and through stillness.

The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.

One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then

Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.

We rarely ever perceive others as being sensible, except for those who agree with us.

The sage is not ill, because he sees illness as illness.

Opinion, a sovereign mistress of effects.

Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no character until seen with the shore or the ship.

Reputation is a hall-mark: it can remove doubt from pure silver, and it can also make the plated article pass for pure.

It is not only old and early impressions that deceive us; the charms of novelty have the same power.

Wherever there is power, there is age. Don't be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.

To be a visionary, all you have to do is make decisions based off of your eyes instead of your ears and your memory.

People like us don't go out at night cause people like them see us for what we are

The public doesn't care about figures.

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.

If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture.

They mustn't know my despair, I can't let them see the wounds which they have caused, I couldn't bear their sympathy and their kind-hearted jokes, it would only make me want to scream all the more. If I talk, everyone thinks I'm showing off; when I'm silent they think I'm ridiculous; rude if I answer, sly if I get a good idea, lazy if I'm tired, selfish if I eat a mouthful more than I should, stupid, cowardly, crafty, etc. etc.

The State is a poor, good beast who means the best: it means friendly.

There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.

Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply; for who is he that assumes to flatter me? To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is, in fact, a subtle detraction.

Matter is real to my senses, but they aren't trustworthy. If Galileo or Copernicus had accepted what they saw, they would never have discovered the movement of the earth and planets.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

Imagination decides everything.

But the impressions which the morning makes vanish with its dews, and not even the most "persevering mortal" can preserve the memory of its freshness to midday.

Suppose, then, that all men were sick or deranged, save one or two of them who were healthy and of right mind. It would then be the latter two who would be thought to be sick and deranged and the former not!

On second thought, it's a good thing love is blind otherwise it would see too much.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.

Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic, alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even

As long as you still experience the stars as something "above you", you lack the eye of knowledge.

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.

What I have to do is utilize as best I can the ideas which objects suggest to me, connect, fuse, and color in my way the shadows they cast within me, illumine them from the inside. And since of necessity my vision is quite different from that of the next man, my painting will interpret things in an entirely different manner even though it makes use of the same elements.

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments. It is not the violins and the cornets-it is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza-nor that of the women's chorus; it is nearer and farther than they.

The real moon,if you could reach it and survive it, would in a deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else...no man would find an abiding strangness on the moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden.

He, who loves the bristle of bayonets, only sees in their glitter what beforehand he feels in his hand.

How could Michelangelo have seen his David in a block of marble? Man began to make images only because he discovered them nearly formed around him, already within reach. He saw them in a bone, in the bumps of a cave, in a piece of wood. One form suggested a woman to him, another a buffalo, still another the head of a monster.

Horrible experiences lead us to wonder whether the person who experiences them might not be something horrible.

It was obvious that he was a man who marched through life to the rhythms of some drum I would never hear.

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.

If you see what is small as it sees itself, and accept what is weak for what strength it has, and use what is dim for the light it gives then all will go well. This is called Acting Naturally.

Watch the clouds. They will teach you about the world of form.

I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers, still crazy after all these years.

Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

I have a radar built inside me to avoid punches

I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals.

Penetration has an air of divination; it pleases our vanity more than any other quality of the mind.

Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous.

Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference and heaven and earth are set apart.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

Tolerance and patience should not be read as signs of weakness.They are signs of strength.

When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

Nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning you give it.

From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.