Quotes About Perception

There are very good evolutionary reasons for having religion. From early human history we have evolved a need to see God. We have a perception of ourselves and in order for that to be a true perception we have to believe in a soul within us.

If man did not exist as a world-spanning receptive realm of perception, if he were not engaged in this capacity, nothing at all could exist. 'Being,' in its traditional usage, means 'presence' and 'persistence.' To achieve presence, and thereby being, an entity requires some sort of open realm in which presence and persistence can take place. Thus an open realm of perception like that of human existence is the one being that makes being possible.

You can't tell me what we're doing right now is not working. The perception is, well, it's not. I don't deal in perception. I want to deal in reality. The reality of the matter is that the percentage of guys who are taking has gone way down.

Mysticism is concerned primarily with moving our awareness field from the beginning of the band of perception, the human band, up to the enlightened bands of perception.

A film is like a message dropped in a bottle in the sea that somebody finds. Every time somebody finds it, it's a miracle. But, I don't know what the perception will be. I can know what I tried to do, but I never know what the perception is.

The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought.

Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him. For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.

The idea that the universe itself is physically structured around hierarchy was sort of an integration of earlier science and theology that was made by people like Thomas Aquinas, that was assumed doctrinally in that tradition. The Reformation rejected that model of reality and created a highly individualistic metaphysics in the sense that it located everything normative that can be said about reality in human perception, there being, of course, no other avenue of knowing. There is Scripture, there is conscience, there is perception itself.

The human field of perception is not the only band of perception. Nor is it necessarily the best; there is no such thing in infinity. Infinity does not label.

I don't think that we can figure out what is going on in conscious colour perception just by phenomenological introspection. We need to know about brain mechanisms as well. We need to figure out what information is present in the mechanisms that constitute conscious colour perception.

In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way. Mental and spiritual gifts will be more in demand than gifts of a physical nature. Extrasensory perception will take precedence over sensory perception. And in this sphere woman will again predominate.

Wordsworth was right when he said that we trail clouds of glory as we come into the world, that we are born with a divine sense of perception. As we grow older, the world closes in on us, and we gradually lose the freshness of viewpoint that we had as children. That is why I think children should get to know this country while they are young.

It is also certain that when we assent to some piece of reasoning when our perception of it is lacking, then either we go wrong, or, if we do stumble on the truth, it is by accident, so that we cannot be sure that we are not in error.

The biggest problem with dyslexic kids is not the perceptual problem, it is their perception of themselves. That was my biggest problem.

But the perception of life as an organic unity is a slow achievement, and depends for its growth on a people's entry into the main current of world-events.

All perception is colored by emotion.

We're trapped on this very thin slice of perception ... But even at that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of what's going on.

The laws of thermodynamics, as empirically determined, express the approximate and probable behavior of systems of a great number of particles, or, more precisely, they express the laws of mechanics for such systems as they appear to beings who have not the fineness of perception to enable them to appreciate quantities of the order of magnitude of those which relate to single particles, and who cannot repeat their experiments often enough to obtain any but the most probable results.

My own perception of cops was that they came into your neighborhood, they roughed up people that you loved for no reason and took them away. As a child you saw that.

Do you love me? Means at last do you see the same truth I see? If you do, we are happy together; but when presently one of us passes into the perception of a new truth, we are divorced and the force of all nature cannot hold us to each other.

Both happiness and unhappiness depend on perception

Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the president because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?

Truths are not truths to you unless you realize them within yourself. Without realization, they are just ideas. For spiritual perception, spiritual consciousness, lies not in vague theological ideas, but in the acquisition of Self-realization.

We see things not as they are, but as we are. Our perception is shaped by our precious experiences.

Life is perception. We perceive through different parts of the body of the universe.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

At last, Mythic feeling and conscious perception no longer confront each other as antagonists but as allies. Passionate nationalism is no longer directed toward tribal, dynastic or theological loyalties, but toward that primal substance, the racially based nationhood itself. Here is the message which will one day melt away all dross, eliminate all that is base, and bring into being all that is noble.

It is quite reasonable to subscribe both to the old saw that no good girl was ever ruined by a book and to the perception that it is not good for children to be constantly exposed to the sexual violence in our popular culture. Protecting children seems to me logically, legally, and rather easily differentiated from censorship.

For the perception of the beautiful we have the term "taste"--a metaphor taken from that which is passive in the body and transferred to that which is active in the mind.

Tis the perception of the beautiful, A fine extension of the faculties, Platonic, universal, wonderful, Drawn from the stars, and filtered through the skies, Without which life would be extremely dull

One must have a thorough knowledge of anatomy and a good perception of depth for silhouette work. Otherwise they resemble those childish picture cards, snipped out by some fool who doesn't know what he is trying to do.

Reincarnation is a process in which a finite being will go through a series of transmutations and will perceive different things. There will be a continuity of perception.

[John] Adams's perception of Europe, and especially France, was clearly different than [Tomas] Jefferson's. For Jefferson, the luxury and sophistication of Europe only made American simplicity and virtue appear dearer. For Adams, by contrast, Europe represented what America was fast becoming - a society consumed by luxury and vice and fundamentally riven by a struggle between rich and poor, gentlemen and commoners.

We're in a very unique time where noise equals, in a lot of people's perception, advocacy. And I fundamentally disagree with that.

A perception, sudden as blinking, that subject and object are one, will lead to a deeply mysterious understanding; and by this understanding you will awaken to the truth.

Christ delves far beyond the means of superficiality, not simply because of his immaculate love, but also because he considers the distinct cases of each individual rather than withholding a broadened perception by use of stereotypes.

For truly in nature there are many operations that are far more than mechanical. Nature is not simply an organic body like a clock, which has no vital principle of motion in it; but it is a living body which has life and perception, which are much more exalted than a mere mechanism or a mechanical motion.

Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another. This painting here. I bought it 10 years ago for 60 thousand dollars. I could sell it today for 600. The illusion has become real and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it.

Find a teacher of Tantric Zen and study with them because it is transference of awareness, a sharing of the perception of the beauty of life.

Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving

It is a common perception that actors don’t get along.

Without claiming superiority of intellectual over visual understanding, one is nevertheless bound to admit that the cinema allowsa number of æsthetic-intellectual means of perception to remain unexercised which cannot but lead to a weakening of judgment.

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.

Getting lost in human perception is a very scary idea.

There is a distorted perception of what goes on in Brussels. No one reports on the Commission taking a hundred initiatives from its predecessor off the table in order to shift competencies back to member state governments.

For the strategies of deception are concerned with deceiving an opponent through the logistics of perception. But these strategies are not merely aimed at the Serbs or the Iraqis but also at all those who might support [Slobodan] Milosevic or Saddam Hussein.

The reason we can't attain the highest level of knowledge while incarnate is that we can't then wholly escape the influence of the body (and so of perception and of certain desires that take us away from thinking properly); and that prevents us from understanding fully what forms are, which one must do in order to have the highest level of knowledge.

The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon, and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything youve ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy.