Perception Quotes
More Perception Quotes
Natural thunder heralds the wetness of fresh water high clouds to quench the thirst of fields gone dry and parched, a messenger of blessed rain, but this was as dry as hell must be. My distraught perception refused to believe it, because of the insane suddenness with which it sounded, swelled and hit, and how casually it came to murder my child.
anna akhmatova— "The First Long Range Artillery Fire On Leningrad," translated by Daniela Gioseffi (1993)
The widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are 'left over.' However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural--and last but not least--political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed.
johannes grenzfurthner— Interview with Furtherfield
The basis for the Bharat Natyam technique is the perception of the human body as a geometric ideal both in its static position (pictured as the straight axis around which a circle could be drawn) and its articulation through the dance (which explores all the harmonious geometric shapes possible from the central axis within the circle).
Shobana Jeyasingh— In The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, edited by Alexandra Carter and Janet O'Shea; Chapter 17: "Getting Off the Orient Express" (1998, p. 184).
selected by Nanobug 2004 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
— used 9 February 2004, selected by Moby
It is singular that the Japanese, who rarely commit a solecism in taste in their national costume, architecture, or decorative art, seem to be perfectly destitute of perception when they borrow ours.
Isabella married name Isabella Bishop Bird— 1880 Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels on Horseback in the Interior1880 (published1885).
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
william blake— 1790 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 'A Memorable Fancy', plate14. Aldous Huxley used this phrase as the title of his work The Doors of Perception (1954).
The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art? The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task.
john dewey— 1934 Art as Experience.
We are perceived as a nation at war with Muslims. This debilitating and dangerous perception must be reversed.
chuck hagel—
Boredom lies only with the traveler's limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while, I found my perception limited.
william least heat-moon— Part Seven, Chapter 7
Canada may be fast-forwarding, jump starting, into a new pattern, a model of communication linkages, a civilization that is more than a grab for power and dominance, a place that could channel the fires of the global wirings, where political alliances are subject to electrical ebb and flow, and the alchemical cultivations of imagination and perception, of the self, could precail of the ideology of capital.
b. w. powe— First Meditation, p. 65-66
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— 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
When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them — without distortion which would mar their exact significances — into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.
william carlos williams— Introduction
The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.
william wordsworth— Preface (Lyrical Ballads (1798-1800))
The sexist perception that violence by anyone against only women is anti-woman while violence by a woman against only men is just generic violence creates a political demand for laws that are even more protective of women.
warren farrell— p. 228. (Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex)
Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.
Immanuel Kant— A 120 (Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787))
Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.
Marshall McLuhan— p. 17 ("The Agenbite of Outwit")
Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
Marshall McLuhan— p. 121 ("The Agenbite of Outwit")
When one analyzes the pre-conscious step to concepts, one always finds ideas which consist of "symbolic images." The first step to thinking is a painted vision of these inner pictures whose origin cannot be reduced only and firstly to the sensual perception but which are produced by an 'instinct to imagining' and which are re-produced by different individuals independently, i.e. collectively... But the archaic image is also the necessary predisposition and the source of a scientific attitude. To a total recognition belong also those images out of which have grown the rational concepts.
wolfgang pauli— Letter to Markus Fierz (1948)
It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.
— C. W. Leadbeater, in The Chakras (1927), p. 138
He gives us the very quintessence of perception.
james russell lowell— James Russell Lowell, My Study Window, Coleridge, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 593
Totaram was a remarkably able man. His writings in Hindi show a perception, idealism, tolerance, wit, balance, and shrewd practicality seldom matched by any of his European or Indian contemporaries, and as a debater he was supreme.
— K.L. Gillion, Fiji’s Indian Migrants: A History to the end of Indenture in 1920, (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1962)
Disability is a matter of perception. If you can do just one thing well, you’re needed by someone.
— Martina Navratilova, quoted in p 15, Grand Ideas from Within By Janice M. Mcdermott & Joan Stewart
Watching violence in movies or in TV programs stimulates the spectators to imitate what they see much more than if seen live or on TV news. In movies, violence is filmed with perfect illumination, spectacular scenery, and in slow motion, making it even romantic. However, in the news, the public has a much better perception of how horrible violence can be, and it is used with objectives that do not exist in the movies.
Steven Spielberg— In an interview by the Brazilian magazine Veja (1993).
By experience; by a sense of human frailty; by a perception of "the soul of goodness in things evil;" by a cheerful trust in human nature; by a strong sense of God's love; by long and disciplined realization of the atoning love of Christ; only thus can we get a free, manly, large, princely spirit of forgiveness.
— F. W. Robertson, p. 252 (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers)
It is the public’s perception that their children are safe from tornadic wind events while at school because their school has an established tornado shelter. However, it may be a tornado shelter in name only; in fact, the only reason that area may be a “shelter” is because someone called it one. A tornado safer area designed by an experienced architectural and engineering team is essential in providing what FEMA has labeled “near-absolute” protection from tornadoes.
— Corey Schultz, PBA Architects, Wichita, Kansas; John Metz, Building Data Services, Wichita, Kansas
The question of how to interpret hypnosis divides psychiatrists into two camps. He [David Spiegel] and many other psychiatrists regard hypnosis as a genuine mental state, in which our perception of reality changes and our mind ¬ like a telephoto lens ¬ zooms in on a subject.
— Mitch Leslie, in Research supports the notion that hypnosis can transform perception
They are not just suffering in silence ¬ they are able to change their perception of pain .
— David Spiegel, in “Research supports the notion that hypnosis can transform perception.”
For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist , a certain physiological precondition is indispensable; intoxication . Intoxication must first have heightened the excitability of the entire machine: no art results before that happens.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, in Nietzsche's Revaluation of Values: A Study in Strategies, p.132
