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They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.
-Kahlil Gibran, "A Handful of Sand on the Shore"
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The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.
-Remy De Gourmont
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With spiritual work, the terms 'is' or 'are' become progressively replaced by the term 'seems to', which is due to the increasing realization of the degree to which perception is the mask that hinders truth.
-David R. Hawkins
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The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is -- and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but as something that is.
-Mark Helprin
Winter's Tale
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Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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When I was research head of General Motors and wanted a problem solved, I'd place a table outside the meeting room with a sign: LEAVE SLIDE RULES HERE! If I didn't do that, I'd find some engineer reaching for his slide rule. Then he'd be on his feet saying, Boss you can't do that.
-Charles Franklin Kettering
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See simplicity in the complicated.
Achieve greatness in little things.
-Lao-Tzu
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You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
-Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird
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Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuit prius in sensu:
Nothing is in the understanding, which was not first perceived by some of the senses.
-John Locke
attributed, exact source uncertain
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He gives us the very quintessence of perception,
-James Russell Lowell
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It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.
-Niccolo Machiavelli
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We think too small. Like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.
-Mao Tse Tung
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Only in quiet waters things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.
-Hans Margolius
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An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.
-H. L. Mencken
A Little Book in C Major, p. 16, 1916
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The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
-Henry Miller
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...there is no constant existence, neither of our being, nor of the objects. And we, and our judgement, and all mortal things else do uncessantly roll, turn, and passe away. Thus can nothing be certainly established, nor of the one, nor of the other; both the judging and the judged being in continual alteration and motion. We have no communication with being; for every humane nature is ever in the middle between being borne and dying; giving nothing of itself but an obscure appearance and shadow, and an uncertain and weak opinion. And if perhaps you fix your thought to take its being, it would be even as if one should go about to grasp the water: for how much the more he shall close and press that, which by its own nature is ever gliding, so much the more he shall loose what he would hold and fasten. Thus, seeing all things are subject to passe from one real change to another, reason, which therein seeketh a real subsistence, finds herself deceived as unable to apprehend any thing subsistent and permanent...
-Michel de Montaigne
Essays, in three volumes translated by John Florio
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The unlived life is not worth examining.
-Tom Morris
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Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
-Napoleon
Maxims
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The difference between a mountain and a molehill is your perspective.
-Al Neuharth
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We don't see things as they are.
We see them as we are.
-Anais Nin
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There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer
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By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.
-Jos
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One drop has just fallen.
It is a precious moment, and one that is full of poignancy. In surrendering to gravity and slipping off the leaf, the drop loses its previous identity and joins the vastness of the water below. We can imagine that it must have trembled before it fell, just on the edge between the known and the unknowable.
-Osho [Chandra Mohan Jain]
The Zen Tarot - A commentary
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It is the business of thought to define things, to find the boundaries; thought, indeed, is a ceaseless process of definition. It is the business of Art to give things shape. Anyone who takes no delight in the firm outline of an object, or in its essential character, has no artistic sense. He cannot even be nourished by Art. Like Ephraim, he feeds upon the East wind, which has no boundaries.
-Vance Palmer
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We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see.
-Charles Peguy
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Books about Perception
