Quotes about Perception

No person or situation can make you fed anything-it is only the way you think about a situation that makes you feel the way you do.

This is the basic principle that underlies most religion, psychology, philosophy, and metaphysics. This law says, "Whatever you believe, with conviction, becomes your reality.

You are who you think you are.

Most of your emotions, positive or negative, are determined by how you talk to yourself on a minute-to-minute basis. It is not what happens to you but the way that you interpret the things that are happening to you that determines how you feel.

The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small.

And reading itself is an amazing activity: You glance at a thin, flat object made from a tree...and the voice of the author begins to speak inside your head. (Hello!)

We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling. HENRI POINCARÉ (1854—1912)

Hallucinations may be a neglected low door in the wall to a scientific understanding of the sacred.

Whatever their neurological and molecular antecedents, hallucinations feel real. They are sought out in many cultures and considered a sign of spiritual enlightenment.

So, I think the bureaucratic religions try to institutionalize your perception of the numinous instead of providing the means so you can perceive the numinous directly—like looking through a six-inch telescope. If sensing the numinous is at the heart of religion, who's more religious would you say—the people who follow the bureaucratic religions or the people who teach themselves science?

She was reasonably sure her remarks were not entirely foolish, and did not wish to be ignored, much less ignored and patronized alternately. Part of it—but only a part—she knew was due to the softness of her voice. So she developed a physics voice, a professional voice: clear, competent, and many decibels above conversational. With such a voice it was important to be right. She had to pick her moments

In everyday life, it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never challenged. They can, instead, be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are, or become a work in continual artistic revision.