Perception Reality Quotes

We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world. ~ Stephen R. Covey

Part ways with your perception of reality, allow the unknown and your curiosity muster into a visual you've never allowed yourself to see. ~ Elizabeth Lomeli

Perception meets you at the intersection of your beliefs and reality. ~ Bryant McGill

Different creatures have different eyes. Human eyes (unlike, say, a cat's eyes, or an octopus's) are only made to see one version of reality at a time. ~ Neil Gaiman

Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries? ~ William James

Reality is what you look at and what you make of it. All in between is how you are. ~ Diana Matoso

Truth is individual."
"What? No it's not. Truth is ... it's Truth. Reality."
"Your truth is what you see," Pattern said, sounding confused. "What else could it be? That is the truth that you spoke to me, the truth that brings power. ~ Brandon Sanderson

People don't act the way they do because of me. They just act out their own projection of reality, and so do I. ~ Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

To see through the illusion of duality, remember that fear and darkness have no substance in themselves, for they do not indicate the presence of a second universal force, but are only names given to the one Light unperceived. ~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

All we know is what we're told. ~ Ashly Lorenzana

What you don't see is also there. ~ Marty Rubin

The horror was, Cleopatra meant something to these modern people of the twentieth century which was altogether wrong. She had become a symbol of licentiousness, when in fact she had possessed a multitude of amazing talents. They had punished her for her one flaw by forgetting everything else…Remembered, but not for what she was. A painted whore lying on a silken couch. - Ramses ~ Anne Rice

There are many realities. There are many versions of what may appear
obvious. Whatever appears as the unshakeable truth, its exact opposite
may also be true in another context. After all, one's reality is but
perception, viewed through various prisms of context. ~ Amish Tripathi

I guess I was sad that love was not real? Or not all that real, anyway? I guess I was sad that love could feel so real and the next minute be gone, and all because of something Abnesti was doing. ~ George Saunders

I've come to realize that the biggest problem anywhere in the world is that people's perceptions of reality are compulsively filtered through the screening mesh of what they want, and do not want, to be true. ~ Travis Walton

People see what they want to see. ~ John Green

The illusion is reality. The only contradiction is the observer. ~ Lionel Suggs

Not too long ago thousands spent their lives as recluses to find spiritual vision in the solitude of nature. Modern man need not become a hermit to achieve this goal, for it is neither ecstasy nor world-estranged mysticism his era demands, but a balance between quantitative and qualitative reality. Modern man, with his reduced capacity for intuitive perception, is unlikely to benefit from the contemplative life of a hermit in the wilderness. But what he can do is to give undivided attention, at times, to a natural phenomenon, observing it in detail, and recalling all the scientific facts about it he may remember. Gradually, however, he must silence his thoughts and, for moments at least, forget all his personal cares and desires, until nothing remains in his soul but awe for the miracle before him. Such efforts are like journeys beyond the boundaries of narrow self-love and, although the process of intuitive awakening is laborious and slow, its rewards are noticeable from the very first. If pursued through the course of years, something will begin to stir in the human soul, a sense of kinship with the forces of life consciousness which rule the world of plants and animals, and with the powers which determine the laws of matter. While analytical intellect may well be called the most precious fruit of the Modern Age, it must not be allowed to rule supreme in matters of cognition. If science is to bring happiness and real progress to the world, it needs the warmth of man's heart ~ Franz Winkler

You can't change reality -- only its perception. ~ Lionel Suggs

The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary. ~ Aldous Huxley

Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina's center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm's length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear.
Leonard Mlodinow

Reality is what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is what we believe.
What we believe is based upon our perceptions.
What we perceive depends upon what we look for.
What we look for depends upon what we think.
What we think depends upon what we perceive.
What we perceive determines what we believe.
What we believe determines what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is our reality. ~ Gary Zukav

The stories you believe to be true are the ones your life will become. ~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Sometimes when you're upset it's so easy to forget what's real and go for what makes you feel better. (131) ~ Charise Mericle Harper

How much of what is there do you allow yourself to see? ~ Ashly Lorenzana

Time itself is only as real as your own mental discrimination between the revelation and concealment of the one Light. ~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Everything we think we know is really only perceived by our senses,' he explains patiently. 'The sounds we hear are just waves in the air; colors are electromagnetic radiation; your sense of taste comes from molecules that match a specific area on your tongue. Hey, if our eyes could access the infrared part of the light spectrum, the sky would be green and trees would be red. Some animals see in completely different ways, so who knows what colors look like to them. Nothing is really how we perceive it. ~ Wendy Mass

There are billions of people in the world, and each one of them has their own view of reality. ~ Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

Doubts are suppressed by groups ... But remember that the internal incentives that shape how the group perceives risks and rewards may be very different from the reality of the risks and rewards in the external marketplace. Those incentives can distort risk perception. ~ Daniel Kahneman

We can become fearless as we let go off our grasp on the fear of failure, because failure too is a perception rather than a reality. ~ Gyalwa Dokhampa

We open our eyes and we think we're seeing the whole world out there. But what has become clear - and really just in the last few centuries - is that when you look at the electro-magnetic spectrum we are seeing less than 1/10 Billionth of the information that's riding on there. So we call that visible light. But everything else passing through our bodies is completely invisible to us.
Even though we accept the reality that's presented to us, we're really only seeing a little window of what's happening. ~ David Eagleman

Sometimes what you see is not real, and the reality is not what you see. Somewhere between both these reasoning resides a fact: where there is a lack of trust and confidence, perception will always differ with reality. ~ Ashish Patel

There is a leap of faith with any conclusion the mind can conceive. ~ H. Mortara

Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was - wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind? ~ Kate Atkinson

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are. ~ C.S. Lewis

Most of us go through each day looking for what we saw yesterday And, not surprisingly, that is what we find. ~ James A. Kitchens

The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception. ~ Walter Benjamin

It's madness to see life as it is and not how it should be. ~ Knight Of The Woeful Countenance

Different minds perceive different things, but all are imprisoned, asleep in a paradigm of material reality. Awakened minds bearing a more malleable paradigm, such as those of mages, can bend its rules, but never truly break them. To cross that boundary is to become something more and less human. A god, but absent the restraint. ~ Kinoko Nasu

There is no reality, only perception. ~ Phil McGraw

Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you? ~ Jesse Ball

In some languages (Hindi is one), every perception is called "seeing". Maybe, the trick is to rely on the eyes less and less as one perceives more and more. ~ R.N. Prasher

What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us. ~ Rabih Alameddine

Perception and reality are soul mates! They always support each other and even like to hide behind each other. ~ Balroop Singh

These are ideas. I could say that they just came to me, but it would be more accurate to say that I went to them. Ideas - and new connections between ideas - lead you away from commonly held perceptions of reality. Ideas lead you out here. Ideas lead you into the darkness. ~ Dave Sim

Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain? ~ Stanislaw Lem

Many realities hidden behind wall of perception. ~ Toba Beta

I realized, when I saw the forest burning, how fascinating the firelight is. It's beautiful, and people stare at it, don't they? It destroys things and kills people, but humans love it. Is it because they crave their own destruction, Sam? I want to understand your kind. I am going out into the wider world, and I must learn. But first things first. First, to escape this shell, this egg in which I have gestated, all eyes will be on the fire, all eyes blinded by the smoke, and when I walk out of here, out into your large world with its billions, no one will even see. It's the beauty of light, don't you see, Sam? It reveals, but it also distracts and blinds. It's even better than darkness. ~ Michael Grant

Consciousness is a result of environment. Our cognitions - our idea of reality - are shaped by what we can perceive, by the limitations of our senses. ~ Blake Crouch

Perception, influenced by experience and knowledge creates an acceptable level of reality. ~ Kamil Ali

All experiences, emotions, behaviors and beliefs, that make us humans, are the creation of various intricate and inexplicable molecular interactions within the brain. ~ Abhijit Naskar

People who want to climb mountains just like taking metaphors for real. So when I say I could murder for a mangosteen, I hope you don't think I'm going to go out and do that. ~ Initially NO

Reality is only as true as it is perceived. Reality does not change. How it is perceived does. ~ Murad S. Shah

Reality is based on perception ~ Geoff Thompson

Mind is everything, there is nothing else as far as your subjective reality is concerned. Everything else outside this subjective reality is irrelevant to biological life. ~ Abhijit Naskar

We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

This just makes me know and understand that there is no one reality that suits all; just one that suits each of us. ~ Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight ~ Ayn Rand

There is no truth.
There is only perception
and perception is reality! ~ Manoj Vaz

The life you are living is your creation, your perception of reality that you can change at any time. ~ Dawn Abraham

I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That's been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable. ~ Michael Haneke

The idea that others saw in me one that was not the I whom I knew, one whom they alone could know, as they looked at me from without, with eyes that were not my own, eyes that conferred upon me an aspect destined to remain always foreign to me, although it was one that was in me, one that was my own to them (a "mine," that is to say, that was not for me!) - a life into which, although it was my own, I had no power to penetrate - this idea gave me no rest. ~ Luigi Pirandello

If everyone perceives a different reality based on their unique physical and psychological attributes, their histories, needs, and desires, then whose reality is accurate? The point is, our so-called reality, the world we think we live in, is actually a contrivance. It's a projection of what we perceive, think, feel, and believe at any given moment. That may sound depressing, but it can be quite the opposite. It can be empowering. Why? Because, if our reality is contrived, it can be adjusted . . . and elevated. ~ Joseph Deitch

An individual's perception is their reality colored in the shades they desire
not necessarily the color that it is. ~ Terry A. O'Neal

Let each man say what he deems truth, and let truth itself be commended unto God. ~ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

People enjoy the passion of delusions. However, the world is built on a basis that if you free yourself, you find yourself within another illusion. There is always a truth hidden within a truth. It is no different from illusions and deceptions of reality. The question then becomes
how does one become truly free? ~ Lionel Suggs

Imagine, Bishop, that you have a beloved cat, but that your cat is not with you. If you close your eyes and further imagine you are petting your cat, the same neurons in your brains are activated as if you were petting the actual cat. Our minds may know the difference between its models and reality itself, but it prefers its models. So much so that we apprehend reality through our models, rather than directly via the sense. When I'm speaking to you, I have a little bishop in my head, and though I speak out load, I'm speaking to my little bishop. When you answer, I can only perceive you through my model of you.
Mentars also make models, but they don't apprehend reality through them. They end up, not with little people in their minds, but with highly complex rule sets. They relate to their models in the same way we relate to weather models, as things to consult, but not to conflate with external reality. ~ David Marusek

Why would our brains have this capacity to sense the oneness of the universe, a sense that can be induced in many ways, even technological, if that capacity did not reflect an external reality? ~ Kara Dalkey

It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality. ~ Haruki Murakami

Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That's the nature of existence. ~ Don DeLillo

Our task and challenge as human beings is to appreciate, in the same instant, both the infinite significance and absolute insignificance of life. ~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

How we define and frame the world around us creates our so-called reality. ~ Joseph Deitch

The truth is that, reality matter more than imaginary things - Your perceptions and concepts of the world doesn't contribute anything to anyone. ~ Mwanandeke Kindembo

in simple terms, what you perceive as real, is actually a neurological reconstruction or simulation of the actual real thing. It's not as simple as saying, we see as it is. Actually we do not ever see as it is. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Cognitive reality of an individual solely arises from the make-up of that individual's brain structure. Any kind of damage, like stroke can alter this reality without the awareness of the individual. ~ Abhijit Naskar

How we choose to perceive affects how we partake of reality; narrowly or completely. ~ Bryant McGill

Because in the end, we die. It's like Chekhov observed in so many of his plays: 'in two hundred years, no one will even know we were here. ~ Zack Love

This is a victory against those who promote terrorism, against hypocrites who tout a supposed war on terror and in reality protect terrorists and jail young men who only acted to oppose terrorism in the United States. ~ Ricardo Alarcon

A third felicity of age is that it has found expression. The youth suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a picture in his mind of a career which has as yet no outward reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things and thoughts. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Certainly almost everything we do and think is colored in some way by memes, but it is important to realize that not everything we experience is a meme. If I walk down the street and see a tree, the basic perception that's going on is not memetic. ~ Susan Blackmore

Any dream is a possibility. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

By saying "blessed are those who mourn", Jesus does not intend to declare an unfortunate and burdensome condition in life to be happy. Suffering is not a value in itself, but a reality that Jesus teaches us to live with the correct attitude. ~ Pope Francis

The defining lines of reality have always been a bit blurred for me. ~ Christy Hall

I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. It's okay if you have to leave us. It's okay if you want to stop fighting. ~ Gayle Forman

We were brought up to need people. For what? For acceptance, approval, appreciation, applause - for what they call success. Those are words that do not correspond to reality. They are conventions, things that are invented, but we don't realize that they don't correspond to reality. What is success? It is what one group decided is a good thing. Another group will decide the same thing is bad. ~ Anthony De Mello

Leadership is the capacity to turn vision into reality. ~ Warren Bennis

Reality is like fine wine: it does not appeal to children. ~ Donald Miller

The Rockwell magazine cover was more a part of the American reality than a record of it. ~ Arthur C. Danto

Photograph the world as it is. Nothing's more interesting than reality. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality. ~ Rick Riordan

Africa is one continent, one people, and one nation. The notion that in order to have a nation it is necessary for there to be a common language, a common territory and common culture has failed to stand the test of time or the scrutiny of scientific definition of objective reality ... The community of economic life is the major feature within a nation, and it is the economy which holds together the people living in a territory. It is on this basis that the new Africans recognise themselves as potentially one nation, whose dominion is the entire African continent. ~ Kwame Nkrumah

I wonder how much the general population of this country know that the legal system has far more to do with playing a good hand of poker than it does with justice. ~ Jodi Picoult

An insane person is, basically, someone that isn't true to himself and lives between the reality he understands and the distorted perspective of it that he's trying to control. And the bigger this gap is, the more you can be sure to be in front of a neurotic or psychotic individual. ~ Daniel Marques

Sometimes, we can't see our progress. We live our lives every day and can't see how much has changed. I think we all need a piece of reality every once in a while, some item to show us how far we have come from our past to our present. We get so lost in trying to get gratification for our work right away that we forget our small progressive steps. And then, we get a reality check, we see a piece of our past that shows us that everything we've done thus far has been worth it. Maybe you see a piece of writing that you wrote a few years ago, a sketch from the past, or even, like me, you try on a pair of pants that you haven't worn in a few months. And suddenly, everything has become worth it. Your struggle becomes your success. All those days you felt like giving up but you didn't mark the pathway to your future. So keep trying, day after day and look back to the past with a smile. ~ Avina Celeste

I completely reject the idea that working adults need to be treated like infants or worse and not told the realities, harsh or not, about the world of work. Keeping people in the dark and filling them with stories that are either mostly fabricated, unusually rare, or both, doesn't do anyone any good. It is one of the reasons that workplaces and careers remain in such dire straits. ~ Jeffrey Pfeffer

When we have a narrative in mind, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. ~ Nicholas Kristof

People already have a desire for the things Heaven holds. We
simply need to see that these things are not just some fanciful
dream from a song but are a promised future reality. ~ Vance C. Kessler

Each of us carries around those growing up places, the institutions, a sort of backdrop, a stage set. So often we act out the present against the backdrop of the past, within a frame of perception that is so familiar, so safe that is is terrifying to risk changing it even when we know our perceptions are distorted, limited, constricted by that old view. ~ Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Since many people have been asking me to elaborate on why I think "Inglourious Basterds" is akin to Holocaust denial, I'll try to explain what I mean as succinctly as possible, by paraphrasing Roland Barthes: anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong. For me, "Inglourious Basterds" makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp
as a historical reality, I mean, not as a movie convention. Insofar as it becomes a movie convention, it loses its historical reality. ~ Jonathan Rosenbaum

Our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom. ~ Nicole Krauss