Quotes about Perception

How are you, Watson?" said he, cordially. "I should never have known you under that moustache

If the confidence of children can be gained, and they are led to speak freely, it is surprising how many claim to have seen fairies.

A window in Merton's mind let in that strange light of surprise in which we see for the first time things we have known all along.

If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

Therefore the man of genius requires imagination, in order to see in things not what nature has actually formed, but what she endeavoured to form, yet did not bring about, because of the conflict of her forms with one another

Why is it that, in spite of all the mirrors in the world, no one really knows what he looks like?

Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air, had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add this only, that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognise in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognise as will.

I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light, of which our sunlight is but the shadow.

we generally find pleasure to be not nearly so pleasant as we expected, and pain very much more painful.

The past and the future (considered apart from the consequences of their content) are empty as a dream, and the present is only the indivisible and unenduring boundary between them.

the ancient wisdom of the Indian philosophers declares, "It is Mâyâ, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals, and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say either that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller takes from afar for water, or the stray piece of rope he mistakes for a snake.