Quotes about Perception

Does anything genuinely beautiful need supplementing? No more than justice does—or truth, or kindness, or humility. Are any of those improved by being praised? Or damaged by contempt? Is an emerald suddenly flawed if no one admires it? Or gold, or ivory, or purple? Lyres? Knives? Flowers? Bushes? 21.

Nothing that goes on in anyone else's mind can harm you. Nor can the shifts and changes in the world around you. —Then where is harm to be found? In your capacity to see it.

Death. The end of sense-perception, of being controlled by our emotions, of mental activity, of enslavement to our bodies.

If you are distressed about anything, the pain is not one to the thing but to your own estimate to it.

You'll find that none of the people who make you lose your temper has done anything that might affect your mind for the worse; and outside of the mind there's nothing that is truly detrimental or harmful for you… After all, you even had the resources, in the form of your ability to think rationally, to appreciate that he was likely to commit that fault, yet you forgot it and are now surprised that he did exactly that.

He blind, who cannot see with the eyes of his understanding.

The ambitious supposeth another man's act, praise and applause, to be his own happiness; the voluptuous his own sense and feeling; but he that is wise, his own action.

How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them; what is the nature of all sensible things, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain, or are noised abroad by vapoury fame; how worthless, and contemptible, and sordid, and perishable, and dead they are—all this it is the part of the intellectual faculty to observe. To

They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.

External things are not the problem. It's your assessment of them, which you can erase right now

If he be a stranger in the world, that knows not the things that are in it; why not be a stranger as well, that wonders at the the things that are done in it?

Harbour no such opinions as he holds who does thee violence, or as he would have thee hold. See things in all their naked reality.