Quotes about Perception

Because it is not in the nature of love affairs for the lovers to see each other whole and steady.

Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.

I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who'd kill anybody who said something against his mother.

So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.

And a bird who was on a crooked branch is suddenly gone without my even hearing him.

For when you realized that God is Everything you know that you've got to love everything no matter how bad it is, in the ultimate sense it was neither good nor bad (consider the dust), it was just what was, that is, what we made to appear.

It reminds me of a remark Lucien [Carr] once made to me: He said You never seem to give yourself away completely, but of course dark-haired people are so mysterious.

I see as much as doors'll allow, open or shut.

I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.

But let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.

When it is recognized that there is nothing beyond what is seen of the mind itself, the discrimination of being and non-being ceases and, as there is thus no external world as the object of perception, nothing remains but the solitude of Reality.