Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Perception.
But there is another way of using the equivalence, which is almost the opposite of allegory, and which I would call sacramentalism or symbolism. If our passions, being immaterial, can be copied by material inventions, then it is possible that our material world in its turn is the copy of an invisible world. As the god Amor and his figurative garden are to the actual passions of men, so perhaps we ourselves and our 'real' world are to something else. The attempt to read that something else through its sensible imitations, to see the archetype in the copy, is what I mean by symbolism or sacramentalism. It is, in fine, 'the philosophy of Hermes that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as a portrait, things are not truly but in equivocal shapes, as they counterfeit some real substance in that visible fabrick'. The difference between the two can hardly be exaggerated. The allegorist leaves the given -- his own passions -- to talk of that which is confessedly less real, which is a fiction. The symbolist leaves the given to find that which is more real. To put the difference in another way, for the symbolist it is we who are the allegory. We are the 'frigid personifications'; the heavens above us are the 'shadowy abstractions'; the world which we mistake for reality is the flat outline of that which elsewhere veritably is in all the round of its unimaginable dimensions.
C.S. Lewis
The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.
Oscar Wilde
The unlived life is not worth examining.
Tom Morris
Nothingever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the onset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have a malady in the less attractive forms.
Charles Dickens
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
Friedrich Nietzsche
With spiritual work, the terms 'is' or 'are' become progressively replaced by the term 'seems to', which is due to the increasing realization of the degree to which perception is the mask that hinders truth.
David R. Hawkins
The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.
Remy de Gourmont
One drop has just fallen.It is a precious moment, and one that is full of poignancy. In surrendering to gravity and slipping off the leaf, the drop loses its previous identity and joins the vastness of the water below. We can imagine that it must have trembled before it fell, just on the edge between the known and the unknowable.
Osho [Chandra Mohan Jain], The Z
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbir
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Walter Benjamin
A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?I make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true.
Terry Pratchett
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Wallace Stevens
I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person.
Martha Gellhorn
All seems infected that the infected spy,As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Crit
Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
George Bernard Shaw
Any perception can connect us to reality properly and fully. What we see doesn't have to be pretty, particularly; we can appreciate anything that exists. There is some principle of magic in everything, some living quality. Something living, something real, is taking place in everything.
Chogyam Trungpa
Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.
Marquis De Vauvenargues
Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators.
Amos Bronson Alcott
