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The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
MARCEL PROUST, "The Captive," Remembrance of Things Past
What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.
C.S. LEWIS, The Magician's Nephew
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
ROBERTSON DAVIES, quoted in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotes
All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality.
ALFRED L. KROEBER, The Superorganic
Our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena.
There is, perhaps, one universal truth about all forms of human cognition: the ability to deal with knowledge is hugely exceeded by the potential knowledge contained in man's environment. To cope with this diversity, man's perception, his memory, and his thought processes early become governed by strategies for protecting his limited capacities from the confusion of overloading. We tend to perceive things schematically, for example, rather than in detail, or we represent a class of diverse things by some sort of averaged "typical instance."
JEROME S. BRUNER, Art as a Mode of Knowing
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Where perception is, there also are pain and pleasure, and where these are, there, of necessity, is desire.
Perception is naturally surpassed toward action; better yet, it can be revealed only in and through projects of action. The world is revealed as an "always future hollow", for we are always future to ourselves.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, Being and Nothingness
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
ANAIS NIN, quoted in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations
In all perception of the truth there is a divine ecstasy, an inexpressible delirium of joy, as when a youth embraces his betrothed virgin.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Familiar Letters
Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, preface, Plays Unpleasant
There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, quoted in Pearls of Wisdom
Generally, about all perception, we can say that a sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet ring without the iron or gold.
Only in quiet waters things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.
HANS MARGOLIUS, quoted in A Toolbox for Humanity
To perceive means to immobilize ... we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
HENRI BERGSON, Matter and Memory
One has not only an ability to perceive the world but an ability to alter one's perception of it; more simply, one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them.
TOM ROBBINS, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
Your opinion is your opinion, your perception is your perception--do not confuse them with "facts" or "truth". Wars have been fought and millions have been killed because of the inability of men to understand the idea that EVERYBODY has a different viewpoint.
JOHN MOORE, Quotations for Martial Artists
Every man feels that perception gives him an invincible belief of the existence of that which he perceives; and that this belief is not the effect of reasoning, but the immediate consequence of perception. When philosophers have wearied themselves and their readers with their speculations upon this subject, they can neither strengthen this belief, nor weaken it; nor can they shew how it is produced. It puts the philosopher and the peasant upon a level; and neither of them can give any other reason for believing his senses, than that he finds it impossible for him to do otherwise.
THOMAS REID, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
No two people see the external world in exactly the same way. To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is -- in other words, not a thing, but a think.
PENELOPE FITZGERALD, The Gate of Angels
Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Experience," Essays
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, quoted in Robert Lefavi's Reasons to Believe
Truth is universal. Perception of truth is not.
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