1,601 Quotes About Perception

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and what it saw in a plain way. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion--all in one.

I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.

"You see that, my Zosia?" he had asked. "That is the devil. When a man cannot see a person as a person, then the devil has slipped into him and is peering out of his eyes."

Quoting son, Noah Levine: Once you see what the heart really needs, it doesn’t matter if you’re going to live or die, the work is always the same. (25)

The question is not what you look at, but what you see. It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.

People often ask: If there’s a God, how can He allow so much suffering in the world? Realize all world suffering you perceive is a mirror to your own psychological self-abuse, gender imbalance, prejudice, poverty, and hunger. You couldn’t even perceive each suffering aspect of external reality if it didn’t already exist within you. Touch and transmute your own psychological suffering, and perceive the world in kind.

Do you know what the difference is between knowing a bird and knowing about a bird?

Recognizing isn't at all like seeing; the two often don't even agree.

Persons who have a painful affection in any part of the body, and are in a great measure sensible of the pain, are disordered in intellect.