Perception Quotes

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one.

A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world.

It is even a difficult thing for him [humans] to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does.

One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water.

Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.

Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.

They [humans] are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see "forms."

The man who sees little always sees less than there is to see; the man who hears badly always hears something more than there is to hear.

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.

It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.

To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly.

Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.

Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time.

Every soul that has perception is, though in different times and in different organs of sense and motion, still the same indivisible person.

As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.

The reason of this is that if you look at the movement of the wateryour eye will not be able to fix on anything, but its action is as that of things seen in your shadow when you are walking; for if the eyeat-tempt to distinguish the nature of the shadow, the wisps of strawor other things contained in it appear of rapid movement and it seems that these are much more swift to flee from the said shadow than the shadow is to proceed.

Every body that moves rapidly seems to colour its path with the impression of its hue. The truth of this proposition is seen from experi-ence; thus when the lightning moves among dark clouds the speedofits sinuous flight makes its whole course resemble a luminous snake.So in like manner if you wave a lighted brand its whole course will seem a ring of flame. This is because the organ of perception acts more rapidly than the judgment.