Quotes about Perception
What's in a book is not what the author put into it, it's what the reader gets out of it.
— William Golding
The enemy is always in the mind.
— William Goldman
Truth is terrific, reality is even better, but believability is the best of all
— William Goldman
Life is the art of being well-deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.
— William Hazlitt
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
— William Hazlitt
Belief creates the actual fact.
— William James
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
— William James
Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies a withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.
— William James
Psychology is the science of mental life
— William James
Whatever is beyond this narrow rational consciousness we mistake for our only consciousness.
— William James
Our normal waking consciousness . . . is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are all there in all their completeness . . . No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
— William James
Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself.
— William James