Quotes about Perception

If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.

Talk English to me, Tommy. Parlez francais avec moi, Nicole. But the meanings are different-- in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can't be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too.

Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that...

I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.

It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.

You're not sentimental?' 'No, I'm romantic-- a sentimental person thinks things will last-- a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't. Sentiment is emotional.

An idea ran backward and forward in his head like a blind man, knocking over the solid furniture.

he told me all the things he liked to THINK he thought in the misty past.

They were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others.

With the awakening of his emotions, his first perception was a sense of futility, a dull ache at the utter grayness of his life.

All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone else's clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.

All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified - their senses of humour crawled into corners to sleep;