Quotes about Perception

Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.

Just because there's a silence doesn't mean that nothing is going on.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

How were we to know we were happy?

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

What you don't know won't hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don't know can hurt you very much.

Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.

Not real can tell us about real.

But the adjectives change," said Jimmy. "Nothing's worse than last year's adjectives.

Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that's what the mind is for.

Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.

As it says in the Bible, For now we through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. If it is face to face, there must be two looking.