Perception

This page is for quotes relating to Perception.

• "Only through observation will you perceive weakness". - Charles Darwin

• Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.
  • Douglas Adams, in Mostly Harmless (Chapter 9).

• As men of inward light are wont
  To turn their optics in upon't.
  • Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part III (1678), Canto I, line 481, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 593.

• A bird that flies from the ground onto an anthill, does not know that it is still on the ground.
  • African Proverb

• Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
  • George Bernard Shaw

• I see the same sadness in the eyes of conformists as I do in the eyes of those convulsing radically in opposition. I talk to people that aren't like me, individually, thoughtfully. And I listen. If I walk away from a conversation thinking differently than before I entered into it, I have succeeded in doing something that doesn't compute. If I haven't interacted and challenged what I know, resulting in a change of perception, I am still running my own set of stupid old programs.
  • Paul J. Schrag, in Adbusters (2003).

• In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
  • Desiderius Erasmus in Adages (1500).

• It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.
  • C.W. Leadbeater

• It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
  • Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities.

• Miracles seem to rest, not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from far off, but upon our perceptions being made finer so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear that which is about us always.
  • Willa Cather

• Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuit prius in sensu: Nothing is in the understanding, which was not first perceived by some of the senses.
  • John Locke

• Only in quiet waters things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.
  • Hans Margolius

• Perception is merely reality filtered through the prism of your soul.
  • Christopher A. Ray

• Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one.
  • Albert Einstein

• The dung beetle, seeing its child on the wall, thinks it sees a pearl on a thread.
  • Arabic Proverb

• The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.
  • Kahlil Gibran
  • A Handful of Sand on the Shore.

• They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.
  • Kahlil Gibran
  • A Handful of Sand on the Shore.

• He gives us the very quintessence of perception.
  • James Russell Lowell, My Study Window, Coleridge, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 593.

• We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are.
  • Anais Nin

• We're often so blind. Our demand for the credentialed so colors our perception of believability, that we wouldn't recognize God if he appeared within us.
  • Anon

• You must choose:
  Do you wish to see (perceive) nothing, or do you want to see things as they really are?
  It is not hard to see things as they really are, it is simply a matter of tearing down walls, ridding oneself of defenses and presumption, rendering oneself vulnerable, an idiot, a fool.
  But it is not easy to see things as they really are, because it is painful, it is real, it requires response, it's an incredible commitment.
  To go nine-tenths of the way is to suffer at every moment utter madness.
  To go all the way is to become sane.
  Most people prefer blindness.
  But most people are a dying race.
  • Paul Williams, Das Energi (1973).

• Too often we colour our perception with other peoples pencils.
  • Tim Winter