Selected perception quotes

1. To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

2. I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

3. I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

4. The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don't always know if it is green or violet, you can't even say it's blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.

5. I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word.

6. In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.

7. Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape Who dost in every country change thy shape!

8. I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.

9. Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is.

10. Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

11. The entire universe - for one thing - only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality.

12. Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

13. World-view is a product of life-view, not vice versa.

14. What makes bitter things sweet? Hunger.

15. Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

16. Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

17. Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.

18. I believe in low lights and trick mirrors.

19. I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

20. A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by Reality.

21. The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet's greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body.

22. Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.

23. No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.

24. If you cross the Atlantic with an American lady you invariably fall in love with her before the journey is over. Travel with the same woman in a railway car for twelve hours, and you will have written her down in your own mind in quite other language than that of love.

25. Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

26. Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.

27. To perceive is to suffer.

28. Some changes are so slow, you don't notice them, others are so fast, they don't notice you.

29. Why does it so often take a genius to see the obvious?

30. You will never know the feeling of a driver when winning a race. The helmet hides feelings that cannot be understood.

31. Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

32. I now think, Love is rather deaf, than blind, For else it could not be, That she, Whom I adore so much, should so slight me, And cast my love behind.

33. If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors.

34. The headlong stream is termed violent But the river bed hemming it in is Termed violent by no one.

35. When we look at a rock what we are seeing is not the rock, but the effect of the rock upon us.

36. My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose.

37. Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.

38. Genius. It's a word. What does it really mean? If I win I'm a genius. If I don't, I'm not.

39. I think I'm still clean living. That's - I mean I don't go home and have orgies or anything like that. I'm still the same person I've always been.

40. Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing. Awareness is without choice, without demand, without anxiety; in that state of mind, there is perception. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. Awareness has no frontier; it is giving of your whole being, without exclusion.

41. Is it he or is it I that experience this?

42. You remain the more than natural figure. You Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational Distortion, however fragrant, however dear. That's it: the more than rational distortion, The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.

43. At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind.

44. Let's see the very thing and nothing else. Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight. Burn everything not part of it to ash. Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor. Look at it in its essential barrenness And say this, this is the centre that I seek.

45. Ever since I heard you is got a million dollars I notice you is fraught with perspicacity.

46. I more or less dissolved the objects(in my improvisations) so that not all of them could be recognised at once,so that the spiritual overtones could be gradually experienced by the viewer one after the other...and here and there even purely abstract forms came in of their own accord,in other words,that had to have a purely painterly effect.

47. Much of the obscurity of our effort so far against terrorism originates in the now official idea that the enemy is evil and that we are (therefore) good, which is the precise mirror image of the official idea of the terrorists.

48. It's just like Santa's workshop! Except it smells like mushrooms... and everyone looks like they wanna hurt me...

49. The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for the purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all.

50. A lot of people are going to call me naive.

51. I was never interested in the obvious, or in the details one takes for granted, and everybody seemed to be addicted to the obvious, being astonished by it, and forever harping about the details which I had long ago weighted, measured, and discarded as irrelevant and useless. If you can measure it, don't. If you can weigh it, it isn't worth the bother. It isn't what you're after. It isn't going to get it. My wisdom was visual and as swift as vision. I looked, I saw, I understood, I felt, 'That's that, where do we go from here?'

52. The grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me.

53. With the possible exception of What's Up, Tiger Lily (1966), the schlocky Japanese spy movie to which he attached his own, sidesplitting English soundtrack, no Woody Allen movie has ever been more or less serious than another of his works. He's always been serious. It's the audiences who have been frivolous. In Zelig he reassures us that he can still be funny and moving without making the sort of insistent filmic references in which he delights but which can be infuriating to others. Zelig is a nearly perfect - and perfectly original - Woody Allen comedy.

54. It's not too far it just seems like it is.

55. 'See through the news and the views that twist reality'

56. 'Well, Ah see Mouth-Almighty is still sittin' in de same place. And Ah reckon they got me up in they mouth now.' 'Yes indeed. You know if you pass some people and don't speak tuh suit 'em dey got tuh go way back in yo' life and see whut you ever done. They know mo' 'bout yuh than you do yo' self. They done 'heard' 'bout you just what they hope done happened.' 'If God don't think no mo' 'bout 'em than Ah do, they's a lost ball in de high grass.'

57. 'I don't mean any disrespect. I truly don't. But Texas isn't nature. Texas is city and smog and humidity and heat.'

58. Marcia: You look lovely. People talk to me about you and I say you're one of the kindest souls I know.'

59. 'Believe only half of what you see, and nothing that you hear,' is a cynical saying, and yet less bitter than at first appears. It does not argue that human nature is false, but simply that it is human nature. How can any fallible human being with two eyes, two ears, one judgment, and one brain - all more or less limited in their apprehensions of things external, and biased by a thousand internal impressions, purely individual - how can we possibly decide on even the plainest actions of another, to say nothing of the words, which may have gone through half-a-dozen different translations and modifications, or the motives, which can only be known to the Omniscient Himself? ~ Ch. 8

60. The world! It is a word capable of as diverse interpretations or misinterpretations as the thing itself - a thing by various people supposed to belong to heaven, man, or the devil, or alternatively to all three. ~ Ch. 9

61. I fear, the inevitable conclusion we must all come to is, that in the world happiness is quite indefinable. We can no more grasp it than we can grasp the sun in the sky or the moon in the water. We can feel it interpenetrating our whole being with warmth and strength; we can see it in a pale reflection shining elsewhere; or in its total absence, we, walking in darkness, learn to appreciate what it is by what it is not. ~ Ch. 10

62. Reason, an Ignis fatuus of the Mind, Which leaves the light of Nature, Sense, behind.

63. Something in her eyes Must be the smoke in my lungs.

64. First time I saw you, You were sitting backstage in a dress A perfect mess.

65. The hills of manhood wear a noble face When seen from far; The mist of light from which they take their grace Hides what they are.

66. 'One must forget many cliches in order to behold a single image. Insight is the beginning of perceptions to come rather than the extension of perceptions gone by. Conventional seeing, operating as it does with patterns and coherences, is a way of seeing the present in the past tense. Insight is an attempt to think in the present. ... insight is knowledge at first sight.' - The Prophets, Introduction

67. Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions. He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.

68. Le cinema substitue a notre regard un monde qui s'accorde a nos desirs

69. Johnny goes to modeling class in his school for special children and he gets his piece of putty and he's modeling it. He takes a little lump of putty and goes to a corner of the room and he's playing with it. The teacher comes up to him and says, 'Hi, Johnny.' And Johnny says, 'Hi.' And the teacher says, 'What's that you've got in your hand?' And Johnny says, 'This is a lump of cow dung.' The teacher asks, 'What are you making out of it?' He says, 'I'm making a teacher.' The teacher thought, 'Little Johnny has regressed.' So she calls out to the principal, who was passing by the door at that moment, and says, 'Johnny has regressed.' So the principal goes up to Johnny and says, 'Hi, son.' And Johnny says, 'Hi.' And the principal says, 'What do you have in your hand?' And he says, 'A lump of cow dung.' 'What are you making out of it?' And he says, 'A principal.' The principal thinks that this is a case for the school psychologist. 'Send for the psychologist!' The psychologist is a clever guy. He goes up and says, 'Hi.' And Johnny says, 'Hi.' And the psychologist says, 'I know what you've got in your hand.' 'What?' 'A lump cow dung.' Johnny says, 'Right.' 'And I know what you're making out of it.' 'What?' 'You're making a psychologist.' 'Wrong. Not enough cow dung!'

70. I went round to all these minority sports and I couldn't really appreciate them. Fencing, for example, is just 'click, click, click' and it is over. Then they retire. Then they go again 'On guard - click, click, click' and it is over again. You just think, 'what is this sport?' I thought this is really boring and then I went to Judo and it was just the same thing. These two guys just endlessly circling each other, acting as if what they are trying to do is take the others shirt off without him realising this is what they are trying to do. I just thought 'what is this? I don't understand this at all'. Then I went to table tennis, which obviously I could identify with because I had played it myself - not quite at Olympic standard - but I could understand it. It suddenly became clear to me that these people really are so far beyond anything I could ever dream of becoming. I felt really terrible because I hadn't appreciated the fencers. The reason I couldn't follow them was because they were so damn good. Their hands were so quick that I couldn't see what was going on.

71. Most men judge only by their senses and let themselves be persuaded by what they see. Just as the man whose boat sails from shore to shore thinks he is stationary and that the shore moves, men turn with the earth under the sky and have believed that the sky was turning above them. On top of that, insufferable vanity has convinced humans that nature has been made only for them, as though the sun, a huge body four hundred and thirty-four times as large as the earth, had been lit only to ripen our crab apples and cabbages. I am not one to give in to the insolence of those brutes. I think the planets are worlds revolving around the sun and that the fixed stars are also suns that have planets revolving around them. We can't see those worlds from here because they are so small and because the light they reflect cannot reach us. How can one honestly think that such spacious globes are only large, deserted fields? And that our world was made to lord it over all of them just because a dozen or so vain wretches like us happen to be crawling around on it? Do people really think that because the sun gives us light every day and year, it was made only to keep us from bumping into walls? No, no, this visible god gives light to man by accident, as a king's torch accidentally shines upon a working man or burglar passing in the street.'

72. ... name association was big, as were my presumed interests in vaudeville and politics. In St. Louis the Bow tie was characterized as 'very Charlie McCarthy', while in Chicago a young man defined it as 'the pieced eyebrow of the Republican party'.

73. There's just something about Germans; You can listen to a nice, young, affable German fellow and he'll be saying things like' Vell Ja, dis is a critical time for Germany now, economically we are good, but ve have been better. Ve are investing a lot in ze arts, and emerging globally....' and you'll be there listening, thinking 'Mmm, Yeah, mmm... Hitler... mm yeah, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler...

74. though mankind persuades itself that every weed's a rose,roses(you feel certain) will only smile

75. I have sometimes amused myself by endeavouring to fancy what would be the fate of an individual gifted, or rather accursed, with an intellect very far superior to that of his race. Of course he would be conscious of his superiority; nor could he (if otherwise constituted as man is) help manifesting his consciousness. Thus he would make himself enemies at all points. And since his opinions and speculations would widely differ from those of all mankind - that he would be considered a madman is evident. How horribly painful such a condition! Hell could invent no greater torture than that of being charged with abnormal weakness on account of being abnormally strong. In like manner, nothing can be clearer than that a very generous spirit - truly feeling what all merely profess - must inevitably find itself misconceived in every direction - its motives misinterpreted. Just as extremeness of intelligence would be thought fatuity, so excess of chivalry could not fail of being looked upon as meanness in the last degree - and so on with other virtues. This subject is a painful one indeed. That individuals have so soared above the plane of their race is scarcely to be questioned; but, in looking back through history for traces of their existence, we should pass over all the biographies of the 'good and the great,' while we search carefully the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows.

76. A great speech is easy to learn by heart and a great poem even easier. How hard it would be to memorize as many words linked together senselessly, or a speech in a foreign tongue! Sense and understanding thus come to the aid of memory. Sense is order and order is in the last resort conformity with our nature. When we speak rationally we are only speaking in accordance with the nature of our being. That is why we devise genera and species in the case of plants and animals. The hypotheses we make belong here too: we are obliged to have them because otherwise we would unable to retain things... The question is, however, whether everything is legible to us. Certainly experiment and reflection enable us to introduce a significance into what is not legible, either to us or at all: thus we see faces or landscapes in the sand, though they are certainly not there. The introducion of symmetries belongs here too, silhouettes in inkblots, etc. Likewise the gradation we establish in the order of creatures: all this is not in the things but in us. In general we cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

77. I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold tread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery, instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection.

78. He looked to me like an intelligent elementary schoolteacher, certainly not a man of violence. I could not for the life of me see anything outstanding or extraordinary about this middle-sized, youthfully slender man in grey S.S. uniform. Under a brow of average height two grey-blue eyes looked out at me, behind glittering prince-nez, with an air of peaceful interrogation. The trimmed moustache below the straight, well-shaped nose traced a dark line on his unhealthy, pale features. The lips were colourless and very thin. Only the inconspicuous, receding chin surprised me. The skin of his neck was flaccid and wrinkled. With a broadening of his constant, set smile, faintly mocking and sometimes contemptuous about the corners of the mouth, two rows of excellent white teeth appeared between the thin lips. His slender, pale, and almost girlishly soft hands, covered with blue veins, lay motionless on the table throughout our conversation.

79. Vertigo: Detective John 'Scottie' Ferguson

80. The Philadelphia Story: Macaulay 'Mike' Connor

81. -You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. Some day I will expand that sentence into a treatise. Consider the performance of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else: and then you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise its integrity. Isn't that so? - And then? -That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then? Analysis then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing, a definitely constituted entity. You see? - Let us turn back, said Cranly.

82. Mummy... Daddy... The day is full of birds Sounds like they're saying words...

83. Perhaps the most precious possession of man is his abiding awareness of the Analogy of Proper Proportionality, the key to all metaphysical insight, and perhaps the very condition of consciousness itself. This analogical awareness is constituted of a perpetual play of ratios among ratios. A is to B, what C is to D, which is to say the ratio between A and B, is proportionable to the ratio between C and D, there being a ratio between these ratios, as well, this lively awareness of the most exquisite delicacy depends upon there being no connection whatsoever between the components. If A were linked to B, or C to D, mere logic would take the place of analogical perception, thus one of the penalties paid for literacy and a high visual culture is a strong tendency to encounter all things through a rigorous storyline, as it were. Paradoxically, connected spaces and situations exclude participation, whereas discontinuity affords room for involvement. Visual space is connected and creates detachment or non-involvement. It also tends to exclude the participation of the other senses. (p.240)

84. On his wife, Anne Bancroft:

85. You don't seem to understand that you don't have the right to put blinders on other people's eyes

86. I see that you are a person who refuses to revise his view of the would. You can only bear to live in a world where all the bad things happen to you are someone else's fault, where everyone must have conspired against you to deprive you of your due. Unfortunately, that world happens not to be the real world

87. To remember is real. To imagine is nothing That's silly... Most of the things people say they remember they only imagine anyways

88. Boys always argued as if they knew then had the forces of logic on their side, even when they were being completely irrational. Even when their 'Logic' defied the evidence

89. Alvin saw how measure was with Delphi. She wasn't a noticeably pretty girl, though not particular ugly either; she was strong and stout and laughed loud as a donkey. But Alvin saw how measure had a way of looking at her like the most beautiful sight he ever could see. She'd look up and there he'd be, watching her with a kind of dreamy smile on his face, and shed laugh or blush or look away, but for a minute or two she'd move more graceful, walking partly on her toes maybe, like she was dancing, or getting set to fly. Alvin wondered then if he could ever give such a look to Miss. Larner as would make her so full of joy that she couldn't hardly stay connected to the earth

90. A liar sees lies, even when they aren't there. Just as a hypocrite sees hypocrites whenever he runs across good people. Can't stand to think that anyone might really be what you only pretend to be

91. Before the story he refused to even think about it; after the story, it became conceivable to him, and, once he could conceive of it, it soon became inevitable

92. What I'm telling you is, there's some people who do things so bad it tears the fabric of the world, and then there's some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn. They see things, they know things, only they're so good and pure that they don't understand what it is that they're seeing

93. What a clear world you live in. All the lines neatly drawn

94. There was other folks who had a way of sucking you to them, without saying a thing, without doing a thing, you just went into a room and couldn't take your eyes off them, you wanted to be close - I saw that other kids felt the same way, just automatically liked them, you know? But I could feel it like they was on fire, and suddenly I was cold and needed to warm myself. And id say something about it and people would look at me like I was crazy enough to lock right up, and I finally caught on that I was the only one who had those feelings

95. Are they blind? They don't know how to watch things. They don't know how to see anything but what the expect to see

96. Sometimes people aren't what they seem I know that... No you don't... Because you are exactly what you seem, and so you always assume that other people are, too

97. His eyes stayed open. Seeing nothing. Seeing everything

98. She's not ignorant, she's just stupider than I ever imagined

99. People always believer things were better - before

100. Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chavez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a 'stuck pig,' and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.