Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you. ~ Douglas Adams

Perception (from the Latin perceptio, percipio) is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand an environment.

Quotes

Sorted alphabetically by author or source
Truth is universal. Perception of truth is not. ~ Anonymous
You must choose: Do you wish to see (perceive) nothing, or do you want to see things as they really are? ~ Paul Williams
To go nine-tenths of the way is to suffer at every moment utter madness.
To go all the way is to become sane.
Most people prefer blindness.
But most people are a dying race. ~ Paul Williams
  • Truth is universal. Perception of truth is not.
    • Anonymous quote, in Quotations for Martial Artists : Hundreds of Inspirational Quotes to Motivate and Enlighten the Modern Warrior (2003) by John Moore, p. 87
  • Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.
  • As men of inward light are wont
    To turn their optics in upon't.
    • Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part III (1678), Canto I, line 481, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 593
  • The present is nothing else than the sum of what one perceives, remembers and hopes for.
    • Fausto Cercignani in: Brian Morris, Simply Transcribed. Quotations from Writings by Fausto Cercignani, 2014, quote 56.
  • They say there is a difference between actual temperature and perceived temperature, but in the “bearable heaviness of being” the actual measure is no doubt the weight we perceive.
    • Fausto Cercignani as quoted in Quotes we cherish : Quotations from Fausto Cercignani (2013) by Brian Morris, 2nd edition, p. 25
  • The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.
    • Kahlil Gibran, as quoted in If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren't There More Happy People? (2009) by John Lloyd and ‎John Mitchinson, p. 103
  • They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.
  • 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.
  • What perception is, every one will know better by reflecting on what he does himself, what he sees, hears, feels, &c. or thinks, than by, any discourse of mine. Whoever reflects on what passes in his own mind, can-not miss it: and if he does not reflect, all the words in the world cannot make him have any notion of it.
    • John Locke, Essay on Humane Understanding Vol 2 p. 121 CH 9 S1
  • He gives us the very quintessence of perception.
    • James Russell Lowell, My Study Window, Coleridge, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 593
  • Whatever may have been written or thought about perception in literate cultures, it remains a special competency of consciousness, its essential faculty. Day by day, minute by minute, consciousness is preoccupied with perception. Through perception it is captivated by an external world. Without perception it would have to terminate its autopoiesis, and even dreams can occur only by suggesting perceptions.
    • Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System (1995) 1. Perception and Communication: The Reproduction of Forms
  • That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive.
  • I see the same sadness in the eyes of conformists as I do in the eyes of those convulsing radically in opposition. I talk to people that aren't like me, individually, thoughtfully. And I listen. If I walk away from a conversation thinking differently than before I entered into it, I have succeeded in doing something that doesn't compute. If I haven't interacted and challenged what I know, resulting in a change of perception, I am still running my own set of stupid old programs.
    • Paul J. Schrag, in Adbusters (2003)
  • You must choose:
    Do you wish to see (perceive) nothing, or do you want to see things as they really are?

    It is not hard to see things as they really are, it is simply a matter of tearing down walls, ridding oneself of defenses and presumption, rendering oneself vulnerable, an idiot, a fool.
    But it is not easy to see things as they really are, because it is painful, it is real, it requires response, it's an incredible commitment.
    To go nine-tenths of the way is to suffer at every moment utter madness.
    To go all the way is to become sane.
    Most people prefer blindness.
    But most people are a dying race.

See also

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