Quotes about Perception

Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed.

What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited?

What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe.

It did not occur to her that Selden might have been actuated merely by the desire to spend a Sunday out of town: women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their judgments of men.

The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.

It's more real to me here than if I went up, he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.

It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.

Few things discover the state of the arts amongst people more certainly than the presents that are made to them by foreigners.

Have you ever thought about Jesus' physical appearance? If you think about the paintings, he was a relatively handsome Dutchman. But if you think about a prophetic description, "he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him" (Isaiah 53:2). To put it diplomatically, he didn't look like much, and sleepless nights filled with prayer vigils probably didn't help.

The language of shame is extreme. Hear it enough and you believe it. You are told you are disgusting and unclean, and eventually you believe you are.

Shamed people rarely take stands against injustice. Such a stand would mean they would have to go public, which would only double the shame. Instead, once we are shamed, most of us try to make sense of it by believing we are getting what we deserve. So why would we protest?

Anger takes everything personally, as if everything is an intentional act to make your life miserable.