perceptions Quotes

″‘Bet I know something else you don’t. There’s dew on the grass in the morning.’ He suddenly couldn’t remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite irritable. ‘And if you look’ — she nodded at the sky — ‘there’s a man on the moon.’ He hadn’t looked for a long time.”

“Something amazing happens when we surrender and just love. We melt into another world, a realm of power already within us. The world changes when we change. The world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love the world.”

″What may appear to be an arrow or a sword we can actually experience as a flower. Whether we experience what happens to us as obstacle and enemy or as teacher and friend depends entirely on our perception of reality. It depends on our relationship with ourselves.″

“We see with our brains, not with our eyes,”

“The brain is a far more open system than we ever imagined, and nature has gone very far to help us perceive and take in the world around us. It has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself.”

″‘Can you raise your back, or purr, or throw out sparks?’ said the tom cat. ‘No.’ ‘Then you have no right to express an opinion when sensible people are speaking.‘”

“Sherpas aren’t supposed to get altitude illness […]. Those who do become sick […] will often be blacklisted from future employment on expeditions.”

“Then meditate on your perceptions. The Buddha observed, ‘The person who suffers most in this world is the person who has many wrong perceptions, and most of our perceptions are erroneous.’ You see a snake in the dark and you panic, but when your friend shines a light on it, you see that it is only a rope. You have to know which wrong perceptions cause you to suffer. Please write beautifully the sentence, ‘Are you sure?’ on a piece of paper and tape it to your wall. Love meditation helps you learn to look with clarity and serenity in order to improve the way you perceive.”

“Sophie looked warily at the demon’s thin blue face. It had a distinctly cunning look as it made this proposal. Everything she had read showed the extreme danger of making a bargain with a demon. And there was no doubt that this one did look extraordinarily evil. Those long purple teeth. ‘Are you sure you’re being quite honest?’ she said. ‘Not completely,’ admitted the demon. ‘But do you want to stay like that till you die? That spell has shortened your life by about sixty years, if I am any judge of such things.‘”

“It is not enough to merely be authentic in sharing yourself; to succeed in dating you need to consider how you will be interpreted as well.”

“Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in.…Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.”

“Power is an illusion of perception.”

“Perceptive individuals the not quite intelligible feeling that something had gone terribly wrong and would never again be right.”

“I try really hard, actually.”

“One must strain off what was personal and accidental in all these impressions and so reach the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth.”

“And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel – although he neither saw nor heard – to feel the presence of my head within the room.”

“Expectation wasn’t just about what people expected of you. It was about what you expected of yourself.”

“Your perception is all f****d up. All you can talk about is trash that’s already happened. You can’t base your life on the past or the present. You have to tell me about your future.”

“As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.”

“Why, foolish Lucius, dost thou not perceive That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers?”

“It may be well to repeat here the saying that old men talk of what they have done, young men of what they are doing, and fools of what they expect to do. The Negro race has a rather large share of the last mentioned class.”

“If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”

“I think we are innately suspicious of this kind of rapid cognition. We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it.”

“Allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv. It enables rapid cognition.”

“Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.”

“Gottman, it turns out, can teach us a great deal about the critical part of rapid cognition known as thin-slicing. Thin slicing refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.”

“I’m a disease. That’s what I am to you.”

“The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.”

“Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.”

“That makes Mount Eskel important even to lowlanders.”

“Love gives us a heightened consciousness through which to apprehend the world, but anger gives us a precise, detached perception of its own.”

“He was never ‘Connor’ to them. He was always ‘that Lassiter boy.‘”

Yoga Sutra I.5–6: Vrttayah pancatayyah klistaklistah pramana viparyaya vikalpa nidra smrtayah Translation: There are five functions or activities of the mind, which can either cause us problems or not. They are: correct perception, misunderstanding, imagination, deep sleep, and memory.

“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.”

Sutra 3.49: “tato mano-javitvam vikaraña-bhâvah pradhâna-jayas ca” Translation: With mastery over the senses, thoughts, and actions comes quickness of mind and perception.

Sutra 4.15: vastu-sâmye citta-bhedât tayor vibhaktah panthâh Translation: Although individuals perceive the same objects, these objects are perceived in different ways, because those minds are each unique and beautifully diverse.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

“You know what goes on in this world. They don’t understand. They don’t see that long after their laughter subsides, in search of the next cheap thrill, their victims are still hearing the taunts in their heads. A cacophony of degrading noise, poisoning perception.”

“Personality is a gestalt of ever-changing perception.”

“My father took one look at me when I was born and must have thought I had the face of someone dignified and sad like an old-fashioned queen or a dead person, but what I turned out like in plain, not much there to notice.

“This is important because our behavior is affected by our assumptions or our perceived truths. We make decisions based on what we think we know.”

“I’m on deck the dawn we sail into New York. I’m sure I’m in a film, that it will end and lights will come up in the Lyric Cinema... Rich Americans in top hats white ties and tails must be going home to bed with the gorgeous women with white teeth. The rest are going to work in warm comfortable offices and no one has a care in the world.”

“Perception is a tool that’s pointed on both ends.”

“It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of its mindlessness.”

Pooh began to feel a little more comfortable, because when you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

It appeared impossible to the baroness that a man of such delightfully pleasing manners should entertain evil designs against her; besides, the most corrupt minds only suspect evil when it would answer some interested end—useless injury is repugnant to every mind.