Quotes about Perception

is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human beings as if they were merely animals with a toilet, and never see the great soul in a man's face.

Who knows that about anybody?

so much that seems to me a consecration of ugliness rather than beauty.

One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.

No one thinks of your appearance, you are so sensible and useful, Mary. Beauty is of very little consequence in reality

it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid. His school studies had not much modified that opinion...

What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge.

Ah!" said the grocer, "I thought I knew his features. He takes after his mother's family; she was a Dodson. He's a fine, straight youth; what's he been brought up to?" "Oh! to turn up his nose at his father's customers, and be a fine gentleman,—not much else, I think.

The character of the publican and sinner is not always practically incompatible with that of the modern Pharisee, for the majority of us scarcely see more distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the faultiness of our own arguments, or the dullness of our own jokes.

the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection.

The master was odd. I was kind and just to my dependants, but I excited in them a shrinking, half-contemptuous pity; for this class of men and women are but slightly determined in their estimate of others by general considerations, or even experience, of character. They judge of persons as they judge of coins, and value those who pass current at a high rate.

We see human heroism broken into units and say, this unit did little—might as well not have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units; in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that this and the other might be cheaply parted with.