Quotes about Perception

It is strange how deeply colors seem to penetrate one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St John. They look like fragments of heaven. I think the emerald is more beautiful than any of them.

People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind Justice.

He has got no good red blood in his body, said Sir James. No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parenthesis, said Mrs. Cadwallader.

A perfectly sane intellect is hardly at home in this insane world.

Mrs. Tulliver had lived thirteen years with her husband, yet she retained in all the freshness of her early married life a facility of saying things which drove him in the opposite direction to the one she desired. Some minds are wonderful for keeping their bloom in this way, as a patriarchal gold-fish apparently retains to the last its youthful illusion that it can swim in a straight line beyond the encircling glass.

But I wasn't worth doing wrong for---- nothing is in this world. Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.

we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.

But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.

I believe that people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are," said Dorothea.

It is wonderful how much uglier things will look when we only suspect that we are blamed for them

Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.)