Perception quotes
1.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside perception — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take, mentally and arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occurring complexes of sense impression (partly in conjunction with sense impressions which are interpreted as signs for sense experiences of others), and we attribute to them a meaning the meaning of the bodily object."
"Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle headedness - and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at nineteen and twenty."
"There is no fixed physical reality, no single perception of the world, just numerous ways of interpreting world views as dictated by one's nervous system and the specific environment of our planetary existence."
"There is an art of seeing things as they are: without naming, without being caught in a network of words, without thinking interfering with perception."
"No one can read the history of astronomy without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empodocles, Aristorchus, Pythagorus, Oenipodes, had anticipated them."
"To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is – in other words, not a thing, but a think."
"The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearence; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations."
"I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness. I am the Now. I Am."
"Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic."
"Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world."
"In the perception of a tree we can distinguish the act of experiencing, or perceiving, from the thing experienced, or perceived."
"Let the spirit out - Discard all thoughts of reward, all hopes of praise and fears of blame, all awareness of one's bodily self. And, finally closing the avenues of sense perception, let the spirit out, as it will."
"Perception precedes reality."
"Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen."
"All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values."
"The music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment. And I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free."
"Perception is less of a recording system and more of a protection system against external stimuli."
"We see the world, not as it is, but as we are──or, as we are conditioned to see it."
"To be aware of a single shortcoming within oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in somebody else. Rather than speaking badly about people and in ways that will produce friction and unrest in their lives, we should practice a purer perception of them, and when we speak of others, speak of their good qualities."
"Mans desires are limited by his perceptions; none can desire what he has not perceived."
