Quotes about Perception

A lot of gunters even questioned whether she was really female, but I wasn't one of them. Probably because I couldn't bear the idea that the girl with whom I was virtually smitten might actually be some middle-aged dude named Chuck, with back hair and male-pattern baldness.

Besides, now I was thinking there just might be a God after all—that would explain who was currently fucking with my whole notion of reality.

That's the first rule of online romances, pal. No one ever looks anything like their avatar.

So I'm supposed to believe you're one of those mythical guys who only cares about a woman's personality, and not about the package it comes in?

America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

We underestimate God and we overestimate evil. We don't see what God is doing and conclude that he is doing nothing. We see everything that evil is doing and think it is in control of everyone.

Jesus wasn't so much handing out information as reshaping our imaginations.

God reveals himself, that is, in creation and in Christ, in ways we can see and hear and touch and taste, in place and person. Beauty is the term we apply to these hints of transcendence, these perceptions that there is more going on here than we can account for. And that is how we come to identify as apostles of the gospel the men and women and, yes, children, who use words and images and sounds and textures to wake us up to beauty latent and implicit all around us.

Ziklag: for me this became the premier biblical site for realizing that when we get serious about the Christian life, we eventually end up in a place and among people decidedly uncongenial to what we expected. At least uncongenial to what I expected. That place and people is often called a church. It is hard to get over the disappointment that God, having made an exception in my case, didn't seem to call nice, accomplished, courteous, alert people to worship.

I do not have more information after reading a poem; I have more experience.

But to those who can't see it yet, everything comes in stories, creating readiness, nudging them toward receptive insight.