Quotes about Perception

Was and will make me ill, I take a gram and only am.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them (...) you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education.

Nature, or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is too large, too complicated, above all too utterly pointless and incomprehensible.

Unmentioned, what is can become as though it were not.

Consequently, we find it convenient to be misled by the inadequacies of language and to believe (not always, of course, but just when it suits us) that things, persons and events are as completely distinct and separate one from another as the words, by means of which we think about them.

Thought is crude, matter unimaginably subtle.

Time moved for you not in quotidian beats, but in the slow rhythm the ages keep —

Goodness needeth not to enter into the soul, for it is there already, only it is unperceived. Theologia Germanica

If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.

I perceive that marble conceals a multitude of sins.

We float in language like icebergs — four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience.