Perception Quotes

Few have strength of reason to overrule the perceptions of sense, and yet fewer have curiosity or benevolence to struggle long against the first impression: he who therefore fails to please in his salutation and address is at once rejected, and never obtains an opportunity of showing his latest excellences or essential qualities.

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

There are some minds like either convex or concave mirrors, which represent objects such as they receive them, but never receive them as they are.

It would be as useless to perceive how things ‘actually look’ as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.

Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. (Obi-Wan Kenobi)

Besides learning to see, there is another art to be learned – not to see what is not.

Magnificence is wasted on a mouse: they judge all things by cheese.

What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each tends to ascribe to the other side a consistency, foresight and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, even two blind […]

Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things.