Quotes about perception
page 2

“We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

World

“That is the beauty of memory, isn’t it? Our reality is always clouded by our perceptions of truth. (Mnimi)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon Night Embrace

Source: Night Embrace

Truth, Beauty, Reality, Memory

“Of course there is enough to stir our wonder anywhere; there's enough to love, anywhere, if one is strong enough, if one is diligent enough, if one is perceptive, patient, kind enough -- whatever it takes.”

William H. Gass (1924–2017) Fiction writer, critic, philosophy professor

Love, Strong

“No matter how people try to dispute it, perception is reality. Its what you choose to believe that makes you the person you are.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

People, Reality, Personality

“She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.”

John Stuart Mill book On Liberty

Source: On Liberty

Feeling, Exercises

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

A Memorable Fancy
1790s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793)

Appearance

“The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book The Sign of the Four

Source: The Sign of Four

“Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility that one can improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

Personality

“There is a quickness of perception in some, a nicety in the discernment of character, a natural penetration, in short, which no experience in others can equal…”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

Nature

“Power is an illusion of perception.”

Brandon Sanderson book Words of Radiance

Source: Words of Radiance

“This won't look so good in my obituary," Schaffer said dolefully. There was a perceptible edge of strain under the lightly-spoken words."Gave his life for his country in a ladies' lavatory in Upper Bavaria.”

Alistair MacLean book Where Eagles Dare

Source: Where Eagles Dare

Life, Country

“I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.”

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

Success

“Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“It was funny to hear her voice aloud. Her thoughts and perceptions usually existed so deep inside her, they rarely made it to the surface without a deliberate effort.”

Ann Brashares The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Effort

“In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.”

Cheryl Strayed book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

World

“To change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.”

Stephen R. Covey book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Change

“There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Source: Wonder Boys (1995)

Animals

“Lecter is so lucid, so perceptive; he's trained in psychiatry… and he's a mass murderer.”

Thomas Harris Red Dragon

Source: Red Dragon

Training

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

William Blake book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Source: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Appearance

“It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Music

“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Variant translations: The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms — it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties — this knowledge, this feeling … that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.
As quoted in After Einstein : Proceedings of the Einstein Centennial Celebration (1981) by Peter Barker and Cecil G. Shugart, p. 179
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
As quoted in Introduction to Philosophy (1935) by George Thomas White Patrick and Frank Miller Chapman, p. 44
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."
He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
1930s, Mein Weltbild (My World-view) (1931)
Context: The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.

Beauty, Knowledge, Sense

“Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

The Believer interview (2013)
Context: Yeah, our view of reality, the one we conventionally take, is one among many. It’s pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don’t actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what’s going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings. We perceive our own perception, and that perception is to us the entirety of the universe. I believe magic is, on one level, the willful attempt to alter those perceptions. Using your metaphor of an aperture, you would be widening that window or changing the angle consciously, and seeing what new vistas it affords you.

Universe

“people saw what they wanted to see. They didn't need the Mist to warp their perceptions.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Variant: But Annabeth knew that people saw what they wanted to see. They didn’t need the Mist to warp their perceptions.
Source: The Mark of Athena

People

“There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.”

Stephen King book Skeleton Crew

Source: Skeleton Crew

Beauty

“To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: At Home: Essays 1982-1988

“It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Art

“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”

T.S. Eliot book Four Quartets

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
Source: Four Quartets
Context: The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

Sense, Past

“It may be that we are puppets — puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.”

Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) Social psychologist

As quoted in The Social Dimensions Of Law And Justice In Contemporary India (1979) by V. R. Krishna Iyer
Context: It may be that we are puppets — puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation. The fact that obedience is often a necessity in human society does not diminish our responsibility as citizens. Rather, it confers on us a special obligation to place in positions of authority those most likely to use it humanely. And people are inventive. The variety of political forms we have seen in history are only several of many possible political arrangements. Perhaps the next step is to invent and to explore political forms that will give conscience a better chance to resist errant authority.

“Mathematics because of its nature and structure is peculiarly fitted for high school instruction [Gymnasiallehrfach]. Especially the higher mathematics, even if presented only in its elements, combines within itself all those qualities which are demanded of a secondary subject. It engages, it fructifies, it quickens, compels attention, is as circumspect as inventive, induces courage and self-confidence as well as modesty and submission to truth. It yields the essence and kernel of all things, is brief in form and overflows with its wealth of content. It discloses the depth and breadth of the law and spiritual element behind the surface of phenomena; it impels from point to point and carries within itself the incentive toward progress; it stimulates the artistic perception, good taste in judgment and execution, as well as the scientific comprehension of things. Mathematics, therefore, above all other subjects, makes the student lust after knowledge, fills him, as it were, with a longing to fathom the cause of things and to employ his own powers independently; it collects his mental forces and concentrates them on a single point and thus awakens the spirit of individual inquiry, self-confidence and the joy of doing; it fascinates because of the view-points which it offers and creates certainty and assurance, owing to the universal validity of its methods. Thus, both what he receives and what he himself contributes toward the proper conception and solution of a problem, combine to mature the student and to make him skillful, to lead him away from the surface of things and to exercise him in the perception of their essence. A student thus prepared thirsts after knowledge and is ready for the university and its sciences. Thus it appears, that higher mathematics is the best guide to philosophy and to the philosophic conception of the world (considered as a self-contained whole) and of one’s own being.”

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann (1829–1899) German educationist

Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 40.

Truth, World, School, Law

“Aspects of visual perception—motion, depth, form, and color—are segregated from one another and conveyed in separate pathways in the brain, where they are brought together and coordinated into a unified perception.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

Color

“We need a much deeper understanding of exactly what it is our industrial society, in its present creation, is jeopardizing. We need a more profound perception of what is at stake.”

Van Jones book The Green Collar Economy

The Green Collar Economy (2008)

Understanding

“Neuro-rational Physicalism is premised on the neuro-biological foundation of human nature, which implies that thoughts, perceptions or emotions correspond to a physical reaction in the brain.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Knowledge and Global Order https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/article/knowledge-and-global-order/?fullscreen=true - OpenMind September 2013

Nature

“FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly, the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life. Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.”

Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) American philosopher

Source: Modularity of Mind (1983), p. 1

Life, Learning

“Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive? I think it’s my role as an artist to bring to expression; it’s not my role to be expressive. I’ve got nothing particular to say, I don’t have any message to give anyone. But it is my role to bring to expression, let’s say, to define means that allow phenomenological and other perceptions, which one might use, one might work with, and then move towards a poetic existence.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

Anish kapoor in conversation with Homi K. Bhabha in 1998. Quoted in pdf, Anish Kapoor, 18 December 2013, Royal Academy Organization http://static.royalacademy.org.uk/files/anish-kapoor-education-guide-558.pdf,

Thinking

“Now if you do have a perception that any conceivable consideration may be utterly invalidated by some other consideration which you do not know, and if you are reminded of this perception constantly by the fact that things exist, certain modifications take place in the way you feel about things. These modifications have not taken place in the psychology of most people.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

Advice to Clever Children (1981)

People, Way, Feeling

“For so many who had been driven from their office buildings, these five weeks were only the prelude to spending months cloistered in cramped and inadequate office space while they advised senators on some of the toughest calls they would ever have to make … As the gap widened between perceptions of fear or danger in Washington and in much of the rest of the country, I believe it had a significant influence on why representatives reacted to terrorism concerns in a way that was fundamentally different from most of their constituents.”

Russ Feingold (1953) Wisconsin politician; three-term U.S. Senator

On the effects of the 2001 anthrax attacks, from While America Sleeps: A Wake-up Call for the Post-9/11 Era, as quoted in [Moyer, Justin, The speed read: ‘While America Sleeps,’ by Russ Feingold, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-read-so-you-dont-have-to-while-america-sleeps-by-russ-feingold/2012/02/28/gIQATdIszR_story.html?utm_term=.8231b88d08d1, 20 August 2018, The Washington Post, March 8, 2012]
2012

Fear, Way, Country

“In order for a slave--or, for that matter, a slaveholder--to become free, a series of successive perceptions must be realized. First, the person must perceive that the owners (and slaves) are merely human, that is, putting all rhetoric aside, that there exists a dichotomy of privilege and exploitation, and that the privilege is a result of exploitation. … The second realization is, once again, that the owners and slaves are merely human, meaning this time that the exploitation and consequent privilege are not inevitable, but the result of social arrangements and force (as well as a huge dollop of bad luck on the part of those enslaved). … The third realization is yet again that the owners are merely human, by which I now mean they are vulnerable. Wealth does not protect them.”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 63

Bad luck, Time, Success, Parting

“I thought a lot about the beauty of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, we have two expressions that are composed on the same icon: usually to express an expression our whole body moves in that direction, to create another expression we need a different time. These two times, the sadness and the smile, which point out our duality are characterized at the same time. It creates a displacement. It's as if we could not grasp both things together. Hence the perception of that extraordinary beauty.”

Umberto Pettinicchio (1943) Italian painter

Umberto Pettinicchio late interview https://www.shantimandir.eu/la-spiritualita-oltre-liconarelazione-umberto-pettinicchio/, La spiritualita’ oltre l’icona, shantimandir.eu, 2001.

Sadness, Smile, Beauty, Time

“We call that psychical process, which is operative in the clear perception of a narrow region of the content of consciousness, attention.”

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) German physician, physiologist, philosopher and professor

Source: An Introduction to Psychology (1912), p. 16

“Most of the time, organizations generate actions unreflectively and non-adaptively. To justify their actions, organizations create problems, successes, threats and opportunities. These are ideological molecules that mix values, goals, expectations, perceptions, theories, plans, and symbols. The molecules form while people are result watching, guided by the beliefs that they should judge results good or bad, look for the causes of results, and propose needs for action. Because organizations modify their behavior programs mainly in small increments that make sense to top managers, they change too little and inappropriately, and nearly all organizations disappear within a few years.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

Abstract
"Organizations as action generators," 1983

People, Behavior, Problem, Sense

“It worries me because it alters perception. TV, and the culture it anchors, and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: The Age of Missing Information (1992), p. 22

World

“This conscious self is only one aspect of our greater reality, however; the part that springs into earthknowing. It can be called the "focus personality," because through it we perceive our three-dimensional life. It contains within it, however, traces of the unknown or "source self" out of which it constantly emerges. The source self is the fountainhead of our present physical being, but it exists outside of that frame of reference. We are earth versions of ourselves, beautifully turned into corporal experience. Our known consciousness is filtered through perceptive mechanisms that are a part of what they perceive. We are the instruments through which we know the earth. In other terms, we are particles of energy, flowing from the source self into physical materialization. Each source self forms many such particles or "Aspect selves" that impinge upon three-dimensional reality, striking our space-time continuum. Others are not physical at all, but have their existence in completely different systems of reality. Each Aspect self is connected to the other, however, through the common experience of the source self, and can come to some degree to draw on the knowledge, abilities, and perceptions of the other Aspects. Psychologically, these other Aspects appear within the known self as personality traits, characteristics, and talents that are uniquely ours. The individual is the particle or focus personality, formed by the intersection of the unknown self with space and time. We can follow any of our traits or emotions back to this source self, or at least to a recognition of its existence.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Adventures In Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology (1975), pp.118-119

Life, Spring, Knowledge, Reality

“I don’t need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost’s observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person’s random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the “alienated artist” cut off from everybody who isn’t, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so — a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Other Frost”, p. 29
Poetry and the Age (1953)

People, Feeling, Nature, Sense

“Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 183

“Objectivity may also be defined as freedom: the objective individual is bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given.”

Georg Simmel book The Stranger

Source: The Stranger (1908), p. 403

Understanding, Freedom

“The cine-camera and television set allow us to perceive slow motion. The concept of anything other than real time had never occurred to anybody until the first slow-motion movies were shown, and this radically altered people's perceptions of nature.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

As quoted in "some ideas for free from time recording" by Emit Records (1995) https://archive.is/20130628060534/www.emit.cc/img/catalog-page9.jpg

People, Nature, Time

“I've been a television writer for a dozen years, and I've been fortunate to put words in the mouths of some great female characters. They've been working women, mostly, and I like to think they've become role models for a generation of girls trying to figure out their futures.
But let's be honest: TV isn't going to change anyone's perceptions of working women in the real world just by promoting fictional females to ever-higher positions of authority. And I'm not doing my job if I put a woman's career before her character.”

Jane Espenson (1964) American television writer and producer

How to Succeed at Vampire Slaying and Keep Your Soul (2005)

Women, World, Girl, Thinking

“This dialogue between the ongoing research in brain science and art continue to this day. …Such dialogues could help us explore the mechanisms in the brain that make perception and creativity possible, whether in art, the sciences, the humanities, or everyday life. In a larger sense, this dialogue could help make science part of our everyday experience.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

The Age of Insight (2012)

Life, Art, Sense, Science

“Culture produces relative consciousness of the changeable expression of reality. When this consciousness is attained, a revolt takes place: the beginning of the deliverance from that expression of reality. Destruction of its limitation follows. The culture of the intuitive faculties has conquered. A clearer perception of constant reality is possible. A new realism appears.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Source: 1940's, A New Realism', 1943-1945, p. 18

Reality, Appearance

“Third, this allowed us to propose what we called the cosmological interpretation of quantum mechanics. Here we interpret the wavefunction for an object as describing not some funky imaginary ensemble of possibilities for what the object might be doing, but rather the actual spatial collection of identical copies of the object that exist in our infinite space. Moreover, quantum uncertainty that you experience simply reflects your inability to self-locate in the Level I multiverse, i. e., to know which of your infinitely many copies throughout space is the one having your subjective perceptions.”

Max Tegmark book Our Mathematical Universe

Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)

“Humour very often consists of shrewd perceptions about people. It's usually fun at someone's expense. Nowadays if you're funny at anybody's expense they run to the UN and say, "I must have an ombudsman to protect me." You hardly dare have a shrewd perception about anybody.”

Robertson Davies book World of Wonders

"World of Wonders".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

People

“Organized perception is what is art all about... It is a process. It has nothing to do with any external form the painting takes, it has to do with a way of building a unified pattern of seeing…”

Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) American pop artist

Source: 1960's, What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters' (1963), pp. 25-27

Art, Way, Painting

“My first exposure to Batman as a character was Batman the TV series. But honestly, I didn’t know it was supposed to be a parody or campy. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Of course, I was 5 at the time. But all in one fell swoop, I became an instant super hero fan. Later on, as I got older and started reading more comics and getting into the super hero scene, I realized that the Batman show was kind of a comedy. I was reading Neal Adams comics and thinking, "Batman is kind of cooler than that show, he’s kind of scary and mysterious." So my perception of Batman changed over time, and then I went through the periods with Frank Miller and the Tim Burton movies. So now I’ve got these warring Batmans in my head. I still love the Adam West/Batman show. I still love the Neal Adams take on Batman comics. I still love The Dark Knight. All of these things totally contradict each other, and yet it’s fine to me. I’ve said it over and over again, Batman as a character is such a strong concept, he’s the kind of character that you can take him in any number of ways and it still feels right.”

Bruce Timm (1961) Animator

ruce Timm Interview http://www.animationmagazine.net/home-entertainment/batman-under-the-red-hood-clip-and-bruce-timm-interview/ (June 25, 2010)

Love, War, Way, Feeling

“Do we really have to look these chords up in Forte's catalog in order to find a name for them? Another theorist [Christopher Hasty] assures us that, 'Allen Forte's perceptive interpretation…accounts for an essential quality of this mysteriously pulsating music. The eighth-note chords of the flute and clarinets form alternately, with the sustaining oboes and horns, the six-tone sonorities labeled A and B. The sonorities A and B are both representatives of the same set class (6-Z19) and are thus made up of precisely the same intervals. As Forte points out, "There is a flucuation of pitch-class content while interval content remains constant."' 'A fluctuation of pitch-class content while interval content remains constant' is what the rest of us have always known as 'a transposition.'”

George Perle (1915–2009) American composer

Page 42
The Listening Composer

Music

“Most power structures are deeply incompetent, staffed by people who don't really believe in their institutions and that most power is the projection of the perception of power. And the more secretively it works, the more incompetent it is, because secrecy breeds incompetence, while openness breeds competence, because one can see and can compare actions and see which one is more competent. To keep up these appearances, institutional heads or political heads such as presidents spend most of the time trying to walk in front of the train and pretending that it is following them, but the direction is set by the tracks and by the engine of the train. Understanding that means that small and committed organisations can outmanoeuvre these institutional dinosaurs, like the State Department, the NSA or the CIA.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

Source: Repubblica.it interview, 23 Dec 2016<sup> link http://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2016/12/23/news/assange_wikileaks-154754000/</sup>

People, Secret, Understanding, Appearance

“Perceptual space is not a special space in addition to physical space, but physical space which we endow with a special subjective metric. …apart from the definition of congruence in physics and that based on perception, there is no third one derived from pure visualization. Any such third definition is nothing but the definition of physical congruence to which our normative function has adjusted the subjective experience of congruence.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

“Carolina or Virginia may try to break away. In the effort it may destroy its local government as it has now destroyed it, except by successful revolution no rebellious state can escape the jurisdiction, and it will be reorganized exclusively by the national authority of the United States of America. This is what Gettysburg roars and Vicksburg and Port Royal. This is the thunder of the Kearsarge as she sinks the Alabama, This is the song of Sherman's march to the sea; and Lee's surrender, the fall of Richmond, and the universal crash of the rebellion mutter and murmur their reluctant 'Amen, Amen'. But, at the same moment that the profound sense of nationality and the power of the nation are revealed, the national mind has gained a clear perception of the relation of morals and politics, the strict dependence of civil order and national prosperity upon morality.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Sense, Effort, Universe, Success

“One long-past innocent day, in my prefolly youth, I came upon a statement in an undistinguished textbook on psychiatry that, as when Kant read Hume, woke me forever from my garden-of-eden slumber. "The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis."”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

"Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality" (1964) quoting an unknown psychiatric text, reprinted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (1995) Lawrence Sutin, ed.

Youth, Way, Thinking, Reality

“[My audiences] discover they are producing a tonal dimension of the music which interacts melodically, rhythmically, and spatially with the tones in the room. Tones ‘dance’ in the immediate space of their body, around them like a sonic wrap, cascade inside ears, and out to space in front of their eyes … Do not be alarmed! Your ears are not behaving strange or being damaged! … these virtual tones are a natural and very real physical aspect of auditory perception, similar to the fusing of two images resulting in a third three dimensional image in binocular perception… I want to release this music which is produced by the listener…”

Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009) Composer and installation artist

Quoted in: " Maryanne Amacher, Synaptic Island http://datagarden.org/5483/maryanne-amacher-synaptic-island/," on datagarden.org, 2015.

Music, Nature, Dance

“Although it is by definition a union-oriented ideology, there is no perceptible syndicalist presence in any union. A syndicalist is more likely to be a professor than a proletarian, more likely to be a folk singer than a factory worker. Organizers on principle, syndicalists are disunited and factionalized. Remarkably, this dullest of all anarchisms attracts some of the most irrational and hysterical adherents. Only a rather small minority of North American anarchists are syndicalists. Syndicalism will persist, if at all, as a campus-based cult in increasing isolation from the main currents of anarchism.”

Bob Black (1951) American anarchist

Source: Anarchy after Leftism (1997), Chapter 11: Anarchy after Leftism

“What is there new that we have yet to accomplish? Love, for as yet we have only accomplished hatred and self-pleasing; Knowledge, for as yet we have only accomplished error and perception and conceiving; Bliss, for as yet we have only accomplished pleasure and pain and indifference; Power, for as yet we have only accomplished weakness and effort and a defeated victory; Life, for as yet we have only accomplished birth and growth and dying; Unity, for as yet we have only accomplished war and association.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)

Love, Life, Pain, War

“It (the fetus) is strongly aware of your feelings toward it. At times the personality traits that it had earlier color this perception. It pushes these aside impatiently. It has mental images of its own probable future, and parts of it do become frightened at times, to relinquish old adult powers for an infant's helplessness.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 499, Page 380
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 9

Color, Feeling, Time, Future

“Naturally, in order to find in this break [in the visual perception] with time-honored habits a basis for a new pictorial harmony and a plastic means of dealing with life and movement, there must be an artistic sensibility far in advance of the normal vision of the crowd.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote, 1914, in 'Functions of Painting by Fernand Leger'; p. 12
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1910's, Contemporary Achievements in Painting, 1914

Life, Nature, Time

“Perception creates behavior. Perception encourages behavior. And because this institution--this artifice--continues to socially reinforce patterns of perception and behavior, if this behavior is destructive, it may not be a bad idea to eliminate or curtail the institution.”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 50

Behavior, Idea

“Some students at BYU perceive general education as an unfortunate burden that does little for them professionally. I was rudely awakened to this perception the first time that I taught Biology 100. Having loved biology my entire life, I assumed that all 250 students in my class would be as enthusiastic as I was to study biology. I quickly learned that most of my students dreaded having to take the course and had little interest in the sciences. My challenge was to help them learn to reverently admire the intricate wonders of God's creation that are evident when we study life. General education is especially important at BYU, for here a thoughtful study of the arts and sciences can be, in President Kimball's words, "bathed in the light and color of the restored gospel."”

Daniel J. Fairbanks (1956) American artist

Let me share with you a few of my own experiences.
The quoted line is taken from "Education for Eternity" (12 Septemebr 1967), by Spencer W. Kimball, p. 11, preschool address to BYU faculty and staff.
The Arts, the Sciences, and the Light of the Gospel (2000)

Love, Life, God, Education

“We love dogs and eat cows not because dogs and cows are fundamentally different—cows, like dogs, have feelings, preferences, and consciousness—but because our perception of them is different.”

Melanie Joy book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

Source: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2010), p. 13

Love, Dogs, Feeling

“I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 1
An American Dream (1965)

Death, Motivation, Universe

“Reality is so dull, Alan thought. Any mistake in one’s perception of it is inevitably more interesting than the real thing, and lucky are those who remain uninformed of their error.”

Amanda Filipacchi book Love Creeps

Love Creeps (2005)

Error, Reality

“Free will is an illusion. It is synonymous with incomplete perception.”

Robert J. Sawyer book Flashforward

Source: Flashforward (1999), Chapter 12 epigram (p. 123; quoting Walter Kubilius)

“Although age has its normal limits, it may be extended by two things-the study of history and by travel. Reading history broadens one's perception of the creation of the world, while travel extends one's field of vision.”

Mahmud Tarzi (1865–1933) Afghan writer

Preface
A Book of Travel to Three Continents (Translated from Dahri) (1914)

Age, World, Travel, History

“Human sense organs can receive only news of difference, and the differences must be coded into events in time (i. e., into changes) in order to be perceptible. Ordinary static differences that remain constant for more than a few seconds become perceptible, only by scanning. Similarly, very slow changes become perceptible only by a combination of scanning and bringing together observations from separated moments in the continuum of time.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 74-75

Sense, Change, Time

“We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself — he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life.”

Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) American academic

Note to the "Criticism" section
The Portable Matthew Arnold (Viking Press, 1949)

Life, Art, Error, Nature

“The probity in a public life is a must for improvement of country’s economy vis-à-vis the living conditions of common man. To mould the perceptions of students he wrote biographies of three great men.”

D. V. Gundappa (1887–1975) Indian writer

In page=22
D.V. Gundappa,Sahitya Akademi

Life, Men, Country

“A bit beyond perception's reach
I sometimes believe I see
that Life is two locked boxes, each
containing the other's key.”

Piet Hein (1905–1996) Danish puzzle designer, mathematician, author, poet

The Paradox Of Life
Grooks

Life, Box

“The outcome of the Reformation was the victory, not of Luther's perception of grace in all its purity and costliness, but of the vigilant religious instinct of man for the place where grace is to be obtained at the cheapest price.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

translated as The Cost of Discipleship (1959), p. 49.
Discipleship (1937), Costly Grace

Victory

“One must forget many clichés in order to behold a single image. Insight is the beginning of perceptions to come rather than the extension of perceptions gone by. Conventional seeing, operating as it does with patterns and coherences, is a way of seeing the present in the past tense. Insight is an attempt to think in the present. … Insight is knowledge at first sight.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Introduction
The Prophets (1962)

Way, Knowledge, Thinking, Past

“I don't want to give you the idea that existence without your camouflage patterns is bland and innocuous because this is not the case. The inner senses have a strong immediacy, a delicious intensity that your outer senses lack. There is no lapse of time in perception, since there is no time.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 130, quoting from Seth Session 20

Idea, Sense, Strong, Time

“Characteristically, major social movements are spawned in obscurity at the periphery of public awareness, seem to burst suddenly and dramatically into public view, and eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience.”

Freda Adler (1934) Criminologist, educator

Source: Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal (1975), P. 5.

Parting

“Is it a phenomenological theory? Granted that… phenomenology comes from various shapes and sizes, our fundamental postulate does not make the usual phenomenological commitments. We did not say, for example, that one is surrounded only by his perceptions. In fact, we started this discussion by asserting that there is a sense in which all of us are caught up in our circumstances. Nor do we say that each personal world is an island universe. The words 'personal' and 'private' are certainly not synonyms. I think the tree that falls in the primeval forest makes a bang just like any other tree. Moreover. we might sometimes, although at the moment cannot say how, take an interest in the noise that centuries ago nobody heard and eventually makes something scientifically important out of it.”

George Kelly (psychologist) (1905–1967) American psychologist and therapist

Source: The function of interpretation in psychotherapy. 1959, p. 6-7

World, Thinking, Sense, Tree

“Leibniz foreshadowed the entire doctrine of the unconscious, but Herbart actually began it. Wundt was to appeal first to unconscious inference in order to explain perception, and then to apperception. Fechner was to take from Herbart the notion of the measurement of the magnitude…”

Edwin Boring (1886–1968) American psychologist

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. 246 (p. 257 in 1950 edition)

“For them, we have become seniors. They wrongly believe that we don’t get what this generation wants, that we are out of touch with the listeners today. But that’s not the case. Our shows wouldn’t be successful if that was so. Thanks to the Internet, youngsters are rediscovering us. Young people sing along with me in my shows both here and abroad. Guess, you can’t fight perception.”

Draft:Udit Narayan (1955) Playback singer

People, Singing, Success, Fight

“Inspiration is inbreathing, indwelling, poetry can never be entirely willed. It may be true a poet is given only a single line but that line is a gift from the unconscious, intution, a perception.”

Edward Hirsch (1950)

How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry (1998)

“The purpose of formulating [a] conflict as a game is not that of resolving the conflict by 'solving the game.' It is that of displaying the structure of the conflict and thereby exposing features of it that may be concealed by rhetoric. In particular, appreciation of the peculiar structure of some of the so-called mixed—motive conflicts represented nonzero-sum games may change the conflicting parties' perception of their situation.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport, Conflict in man-made environment. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974; As cited in M.J. Apter, ‎J.H. Kerr, ‎S. Murgatroyd (1993) Advances in Reversal Theory. p. 63-64
1970s and later

Game, Motivation, Change

“Did we not know this world to be but a place of trial — our bitter probation for another and for a better — how strange in its severity would seem the lot of genius in a woman. The keen feeling — the generous enthusiasm — the lofty aspiration — and the delicate perception — are given but to make the possessor unfitted for her actual position.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

World, Feeling

“The Buddha came embodying in Himself the divine quality of wisdom; He was the manifestation of Light, and the Teacher of the way of enlightenment. He demonstrated in Himself the processes of illumination and became "the Illumined One". Light, wisdom, reason, as divine yet human attributes, were focussed in the Buddha. He challenged the people to tread the Path of Illumination of which wisdom, mental perception and the intuition are aspects. Then came the next Teacher, the Christ. He embodied in Himself a still greater divine principle – greater than the Mind, that of Love; yet at the same time, He embraced within Himself all that the Buddha had of light. Christ was the expression of both light and love.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: Problems Of Humanity (1944), p. 150/1

Love, Wisdom, People, Way

“[The special properties of visual perception of data]… is the visual means of resolving logical problems.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

Source: Graphics and graphic information processing (1981), p. 16 as cited in: Riccardo Mazza (2004) Introduction to Information Visualisation http://www.dti.supsi.ch/~mazza/infovis_introduction.pdf

Problem

“This art is music. It stands quite apart from all the others. In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man's innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi [exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting] which Leibniz took it to be.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book The World as Will and Representation

Vol. I, Ch. III, The World As Representation: Second Aspect, as translated by Eric F. J. Payne (1958)
The World as Will and Representation (1819; 1844; 1859)

World, Art, Music, Exercises

“All the pictures [in the exhibition, 1910] include a plus-factor, which robs the public [in Munich] of her pleasure but which is in every case the principal merit of the work; the completely spiritualized, de-materialized awardness of perception, which our fathers, the artists of the nineteenth century, never even tried to achieve in their 'pictures'. This bold undertaking, to take the 'matiere', which Impressionism sank its teeth into, and spiritualize it, is a necessary reaction, which began with Gauguin in Pont-Aven, and has already fostered innumerable experiments… The way the Munich public condemns the exhibition is almost amusing.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Franz Marc's note on the reception of the second exhibition of the 'Neue KünstlerVereinigung' in Munich, September 1910; as cited by , in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 125
1905 - 1910

Pleasure, Way

“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

World, Appearance, Animals

“The outcome of today's case will doubtless be heralded as a triumph of judicial statesmanship. It is not that, unless it is statesmanlike needlessly to prolong this Court's self-awarded sovereignty over a field where it has little proper business, since the answers to most of the cruel questions posed are political, and not juridical -- a sovereignty which therefore quite properly, but to the great damage of the Court, makes it the object of the sort of organized public pressure that political institutions in a democracy ought to receive. […] Ordinarily, speaking no more broadly than is absolutely required avoids throwing settled law into confusion; doing so today preserves a chaos that is evident to anyone who can read and count. Alone sufficient to justify a broad holding is the fact that our retaining control, through Roe, of what I believe to be, and many of our citizens recognize to be, a political issue, continuously distorts the public perception of the role of this Court. We can now look forward to at least another Term with carts full of mail from the public, and streets full of demonstrators, urging us -- their unelected and life-tenured judges who have been awarded those extraordinary, undemocratic characteristics precisely in order that we might follow the law despite the popular will -- to follow the popular will. Indeed, I expect we can look forward to even more of that than before, given our indecisive decision today. […] It was an arguable question today whether [Section] 188.029 of the Missouri law contravened this Court’s understanding of Roe v. Wade, and I would have examined Roe rather than examining the contravention. […] Of the four courses we might have chosen today -- to reaffirm Roe, to overrule it explicitly, to overrule it sub silentio, or to avoid the question -- the last is the least responsible. On the question of the constitutionality of [Section] 188.029, I concur in the judgment of the Court and strongly dissent from the manner in which it has been reached.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment), 492 U.S. 490 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/492/490#writing-USSC_CR_0492_0490_ZC1, No. 88-605 ; decided July 3, 1989 <br class="br">1980s

Life, Law, Democracy, Understanding