Quotes About Perception

Molecules don't have patterns. You create a pattern by the perception of something. The continuity of awareness is your perceptual field. Existence only occurs through the act of perception.

We can conceive a thinking being to have either many or few perceptions. Suppose the mind to be reduced even below the life of anoyster. Suppose it to have only one perception, as of thirst or hunger. Consider it in that situation. Do you conceive any thing but merely that perception? Have you any notion of self or substance? If not, the addition of other perceptions can never give you that notion.

Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember.

Photography is such an important instrument in the education of our feelings and perception because of its duality. Photography represents the world we know, and suggests a world beyond what we can see. Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge.

Death is simply a change in perception. It is not an end to perception as a finite being.

America is especially sensitive to war weariness, and nothing brings backlash like the perception of defeat. I say “perception” because America is a very all-or-nothing society… We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn’t uncontested, it was positively devastating.

But if I did read, say, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, for instance, it always seemed to me that the parts that I understood in what he was talking about - and I read him because - well, he wrote a book, well, the Phenomenology of Perception [New York: Humanities Press, 1962]. And it seemed to me that perception had a lot do with how we take in art.

Your hopes and dreams, as well as your perception of the world around you, come through in your work and make it unique.

Psychology is still trying to explain the perception of the position of an object in space, along with its shape, size, and so on, and to understand the sensations of color.

Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say

I would never do anything that makes the perception of country music worse.

Perception is reality.

Those born blind cannot see; similarly blind are those in the grip of lust. Proud men have no perception of evil; and those bent on acquiring riches see no sin in their actions.

You must be patient, you must wait for the eye of the soul to be formed in you. Religious truth is reached, not by reasoning, but by an inward perception. Anyone can reason; only disciplined, educated, formed minds can perceive.

Your earning ability is largely determined by the perception of excellence, quality, and value that others have of you and what you do. The market only pays excellent rewards for excellent performance. It pays average rewards for average performance, and it pays below average rewards or unemployment for below average performance.

Nothing so completely verifies our perception of a thing as our killing of it.

Perception is, in essence, who we are. We are what we perceive. What we perceive defines who we are.

There's a depth of meaning all on its own in awareness being gentled. From within the subtlety of being gentled, the level of perception changes. Instead of perceiving the obviousness of experience, you're able as awareness to perceive most subtle meaning.

Money itself isn’t lost or made. It’s simply transferred from one perception to another.

When we resent someone in some way we need to "be on the alert" that even innocent gestures on their part can become suspect to us. Even something as simple as their walking into a room or whispering something to someone else can be conjured up in our minds, to look to us as if they're doing it on purpose to irritate us -as if they're involved in some diabolical plot to hurt us further. What they may be doing may have no connection to their past actions that hurt us in the first place but our resentful feelings against them can often taint our perception of what's really taking place.

I hate perception. There's far too much of it in football

Control the publics perception of you and nobody will care if you have any talent.

There was not an episode [on Perception] that didn't deal with some form of mental illness, either my own, or I would be the first to notice if a defendant did a certain thing that perhaps he was suffering from this. And so we got to do some really outspoken stuff for what was otherwise a crime-solving show. And it was just a really good team.

Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment that was older and awaited expectant these larger insights.

My way of expression is full of complications and mystery because that's my perception of life.

We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.

To be aware of a single shortcoming within oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in somebody else. Rather than speaking badly about people and in ways that will produce friction and unrest in their lives, we should practice a purer perception of them, and when we speak of others, speak of their good qualities.

It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning.

Certainly Martin Luther King, in the mainstream perception of him, had a dream. Yes, he did. But the question becomes, what was that dream? It wasn't the American Dream. It was a dream that all human beings, especially poor and working people, be treated with dignity.

People are going to think what they want to think. I let them. You can’t control perception. It’s a losing game so I don’t play. I let them lose; lose themselves in their own fantasies of what they want me to be. A rebel, an angel, a romantic, a heart breaker, a boy, a man. Perhaps I am all of those things. Perhaps I’m none. But what I am is for me to find out, not to be dictated to me. It’s for me to know.

...The human perception of this energy first begins with a heightened sensitivity to beauty.

It's very seldom that we see the good of the South. There is a perception that Southerners are racists and everyone else in the nation is 'enlightened.' There is racism everywhere, and there is good everywhere.

I'm sure that growing up in the Midwest played a role in my chronic escapism. In fact, before I lived in France, I lived in Japan, England, and Bulgaria. I was determined to experience other places and cultures, particularly because I had the perception that I'd been cut off from these experiences as a child.

I want to go back to the child I used to be, and to read with the same naiveté [the Pentateuch]. I want to leave science aside and go back to the pure perception offered to me in the text that is waiting there for me year after year.

You can't rely on your own perception when it comes to anything. You can always be proved wrong.

Ever since I can remember I’ve had positive and negative fan reviews. And whether it was positive or negative it wasn’t always based in reality or what my perception of the music was. But judging from playing these new songs live and my feelings on the record [Scream] – and it’s a great record – there is definitely an audience for it. Also, I don’t really go to clubs so I don’t know what sounds are made there.

The representational-image urge is actually a kind of heightened perception, and I don't stop to think. I don't freeze up - it's actually a kind of letting-go. It's like dancing. At a certain point it's conscious, unconscious, everything is kind of coming together.

Have you ever considered that your perception of reality could be wrong? If you haven't, this is a pretty good sign that it is.

Your life can only be as free as your perception of it

It's the not the subject that interests me as much as my perception of the subject.

Weight issues, race issues will always be there and if you allow them to get to you and you allow them to affect you then yes they affect you. But my thing is I have so many other things to worry about I can't worry about other people's perception of me.

It seems like everybody's perception of me is very bipolar. To one group, it's overpaid, overrated; to another group, it's underpaid, underrated, underdog. It's funny to me because there's no real balance.

The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it's Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity.

Compassion is an alternate perception

What is this world condition? Body is the world condition. And with body and form goes feeling, perception, consciousness, and all the activities throughout the world. The arising of form and the ceasing of form-everything that has been heard, sensed, and known, sought after and reached by the mind-all this is the embodied world, to be penetrated and realized.

Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. ... they bring the world into focus, they corral ideas, they hone thoughts, they paint watercolors of perception.

People wouldn't go on Facebook unless they wanted to share with groups of people. But there is this perception that you have been on a course to push people's information where it's visible across the Internet unless they do a bunch of stuff.