Quotes about Perception

The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.

There are beauties that are more palpable and explicable, and there are hidden and secret beauties… These hidden beauties are commonly by far the greatest, because the more complex a beauty is, the more hidden it is.

People may love a God of their own imaginations, when they are far from loving such a God as reigns in heaven.

If there be such a distinguishing excellency in divine things, tis rational to suppose that there may be such a thing as seeing it.

If we take reason strictly, the perceiving of spiritual beauty and excellence no more belongs to reason than it belongs to the sense of feeling to perceive colors or to the power of seeing to perceive the sweetness of food.

There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness. . . . So there is a difference between believing that a person is beautiful, and having a sense of his beauty. The former may be obtained by hearsay, but the lat- ter only by seeing the countenance.

What we call a vice is actually an inability to recognize what has the greatest value.

The arrows of death fly unseen at noon-day; the sharpest sight cannot discern them.

Everything has two handles,--one by which it may be borne another by which it cannot.

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.

I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding.

if a person fights the clear evidence of his senses he will never be able to share in genuine tranquillity