77 Perception Quotes To Ponder

Perception shapes our reality, coloring the way we interpret the world and interact with those around us. It is often said that two people can experience the exact same event and yet walk away with entirely different viewpoints. This underscores the profound impact our individual perspectives have on our lives. In this compilation, we've gathered the top 77 perception quotes that are sure to provoke thought and reflection. Whether you're seeking inspiration or simply a different lens through which to view your experiences, these quotes offer timeless wisdom and insightful musings to ponder.

1. “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

2. “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” - Carl Gustav Jung

3. “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

4. “A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?I make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true.” - Terry Pratchett

5. “All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

6. “Always focus on the front windshield and not the review mirror.” - Colin Powell

7. “The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

8. “Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.” - Simone de Beauvoir

9. “A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak Electronics, the saftey handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first on the rim and then in the centre of the ashtray.Which explains how the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present.” - Alain De Botton

10. “The very air they breathed was almost a juice.” - Rebecca Wells

11. “Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.” - Wayne W. Dyer

12. “Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.” - José Saramago

13. “The spaces between the perceiver and the thing perceived can [...] be closed with a shout of recognition.” - Timothy Findley

14. “Your agreement with reality defines your life.” - Steve Maraboli

15. “Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind.Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things.Their language has been lost.But not the gestures.” - Vera Nazarian

16. “[she used to say that] each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world – like a bride wears on her wedding day—except this kind of veil is invisible. we walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. the world is kind of blurry. we like it that way. but sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments – like there’s a wind blowing it from our faces – and when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. we see all the beauty and cruelty and sadness and love, but mostly we are happy not to. some people learn to lift the veils themselves. then they don’t have to depend on the wind anymore. ...it’s just her way of saying that most of the time people get distracted by little stuff, and ignore the big stuff.” - Rebecca Stead

17. “That is certainly one way to look at the matter. There are others.” - Patricia C. Wrede

18. “I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.” - Arthur Rimbaud

19. “We know so little about one another. We embrace a shadow and love a dream.” - Hjalmar Söderberg

20. “How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "green"?” - Stan Brakhage

21. “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . . ” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

22. “A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.” - Mignon McLaughlin

23. “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 just as much as the cold inquisitiveness of his brain.” - Franz Winkler

24. “Impossibility only lasts until you find new unbelievable hard evidences.” - Toba Beta

25. “O, wad some Power the giftie gie usTo see oursels as others see us!It wad frae monie a blunder free us,An' foolish notion.” - Robert Burns

26. “Smartass Disciple: But, you said that it's the truth??Master of Stupidity: O Yes. That is yesterday's truth.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

27. “The optimist sees the doughnut, the pessimist sees the hole.” - McLandburgh Wilson

28. “Even if you have not awakened, if you realize that your perceptions and activities are all like dreams and you view them with detachment, not giving rise to grasping and rejecting discrimination, then this is virtually tantamount to awakening from the dream.” - Muso Kokushi

29. “Many realities hidden behind wall of perception.” - Toba Beta

30. “Your desire to advise other people, grows in line with your perception...that assumes you're wiser than them.” - Toba Beta

31. “Humankind has accumulated generation upon generation of knowledge, the culmination of which is the vast and useful technological array we see everywhere in modern society. Despite this great accumulation of knowledge and technology, we still suffer from starvation and war. The difference between the past and the present is the difference between throwing rocks and shooting missiles. We are still in conflict. Suffering on a fundamental level hasn’t ceased. But we nevertheless persist in the notion that if we just amass a bit more knowledge, we’ll all be o.k. Maybe a new philosophy will do the trick, or a new system of government. But all of this has been tried many times.Knowledge builds on the past and has its place. Wisdom is beyond time. It’s the direct perception of reality as it is. And in this direct seeing of what is lies the potential of transformation—a transformation that is not merely a redecoration of the past but a transformation of humanity that embodies the eternally new.” - H.E. Davey

32. “I won't do this movie because I don't believe the love story," she told Selznick. "The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can't fall in love so deeply.” - Ingrid Bergman

33. “When you are so ashamed of your actions, thoughts, or intentions, you lie rather than accepting yourself for who you really are—or, in this case, pretend something happened when it didn’t. The idea of how others see you becomes more important than the reality of you.” - Michael J. Sullivan

34. “Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Would we be able to detect music without the ear? Of course not. Well, we are surrounded by things whose existence we never suspect, because we lack the organs that would reveal them to us. [Was He Mad?]” - Guy de Maupassant

35. “Here's something else I'd like your opinion about," I said. "If he went back underground and sat down again in the same spot, wouldn't the sudden transition from the sunlight mean that his eyes would be overwhelmed by darkness?" "Certainly," he replied. "Now, the process of adjustment would be quite long this time, and suppose that before his eyes had settled down and while he wasn't seeing well, he had once again to compete against those same old prisoners at identifying those shadows. Would he make a fool of himself? Wouldn't they say that he'd come back from his upward journey with his eyes ruined, and that it wasn't even worth trying to go up there? And would they -- if they could -- grab hold of anyone who tried to set them free and take them up there and kill him?” - Plato

36. “The theistic philosopher has a tendency to devalue insufficient worldviews, ideologies, and quite often common sense for the greater good, and in such cases, one should not be discouraged when seen as a bad guy. If he stresses over man's perception of a righteous heart, then he has given his heart to man.” - Criss Jami

37. “The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of people's perception of you rather than people's perception of you.” - Criss Jami

38. “Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?” - Stanisław Lem

39. “The perspective is more important than the perception” - Amit Abraham

40. “Dad had once said, Trust your mind, Rob. If it smells like shit but has writing across it that says Happy Birthday and a candle stuck down in it, what is it?Is there icing on it? he'd said.Dad had done that thing of squinting his eyes when an answer was not quite there yet.” - George Saunders

41. “Thinking can only serve to measure out the helplessness of thought.” - H. Rider Haggard

42. “You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your perception...you see what is, where most people see what they expect.” - Tsitsi Dangarembga

43. “The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.” - Henry Adams

44. “Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.” - Henry Adams

45. “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

46. “We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day.We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,The path of its departure still is free.Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;Nought may endure but Mutability!” - Percy Bysshe Shelley

47. “A hundred francs! Oh, dear me! It is worth millions of francs, my child. But my -- dealer -- here tells me that in fact a picture is worth only what someone will give for it. How much money do you have?"Julia took out her purse and counted. "Four francs and twenty sous," she said, looking up at him sadly."Is that all the money you have in the world?"She nodded."Then four francs and twenty sous it is.” - Iain Pears

48. “All we know is what we're told.” - Ashly Lorenzana

49. “Yet if women are so flighty, fickle, changeable, susceptible, and inconstant (as some clerks would have us believe), why is it that their suitors have to resort to such trickery to have their way with them? And why don't women quickly succumb to them, without the need for all this skill and ingenuity in conquering them? For there is no need to go to war for a castle that is already captured. (...)Therefore, since it is necessary to call on such skill, ingenuity, and effort in order to seduce a woman, whether of high or humble birth, the logical conclusion to draw is that women are by no means as fickle as some men claim, or as easily influenced in their behaviour. And if anyone tells me that books are full of women like these, it is this very reply, frequently given, which causes me to complain. My response is that women did not write these books nor include the material which attacks them and their morals. Those who plead their cause in the absence of an opponent can invent to their heart's content, can pontificate without taking into account the opposite point of view and keep the best arguments for themselves, for aggressors are always quick to attack those who have no means of defence. But if women had written these books, I know full well the subject would have been handled differently. They know that they stand wrongfully accused, and that the cake has not been divided up equally, for the strongest take the lion's share, and the one who does the sharing out keeps the biggest portion for himself.” - Christine de Pizan

50. “If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.” - Tom Robbins

51. “To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.” - Barbara Hurd

52. “Don't be cool. Like everything.” - Shaky Kane

53. “all appears to change when we change” - Henri Frédéric Amiel

54. “The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

55. “I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.” - Flannery O'Connor

56. “Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.""I don't believe in ghosts," I said, faintly."Some people can't see the color red. That doesn't mean it isn't there," she replied.” - Sue Grafton

57. “If I imagine my soul, as I do when I pray, it's shaped like Stapafel. No change of place or religion can alter that. I lived beneath Stapafel from the hour I was born until I was sixteen. I've never seen it since, but that doesn't matter. My soul is in the likeness of a jagged peak with a rock like a man standing on its summit, and snags of rock shaped like trolls along its spine. Screes defend it, although it's not quite inaccessible if you know the way up.” - Margaret Elphinstone

58. “The sun, like a golden knife, was steadily paring away the edge of the shade beside the walls.The streets were enclosed between old, whitewashed walls. Everywhere were peace and stillness, as though all the elements were obeying the sacred law of calm and silence imposed by the blazing heat. It seemed as though mystery was everywhere and my lungs hardly dared to inhale the air.” - صادق هدایت /sadegh hedayat

59. “Each of us sees things not as they are but as we are.” - Jack Provonsha

60. “When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator's have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.” - Salman Rushdie

61. “Still, we permit the appearance of our meats, sauces, fruits, and vdgetables to dominate our tongues until it is difficult to divide a twist of lemon or squeeze of lime from the colors of their rinds or separate yellow from its yolk or chocolate from the quenchless brown which seems to be the root, shoot, stalk, and bloom of it. Yet I hardly think the eggplant's taste is as purple as its skin. In fact, there are few flavors at the violet end, odors either, for the acrid smell of blue smoke is deceiving, as is the tooth of the plum, though there may be just a hint of blue in the higher sauces. Perceptions are always profound, associations deceiving. No watermelon tastes red. Apropos: while waiting for a bus once, I saw open down the arm of a midfat, midlife, freckled woman, suitcase tugging at her hand like a small boy needing to pee, a deep blue crack as wide as any in a Roquefort. Split like paper tearing. She said nothing. Stood. Blue bubbled up in the opening like tar. One thing is certain: a cool flute blue tastes like deep well water drunk from a cup.” - William H. Gass

62. “it crossed Farren's mind that although death seemed big, life was even bigger” - Kate Grenville

63. “An angry woman is a bitch. An angry man is strong, whereas, a sad man or a fearful man is a wimp. A sad or fearful woman is frail.” - Irene Tomkinson

64. “One noteworthy study suggests that people who suppress negative emotions tend to leak those emotions later in unexpected ways. The psychologist Judith Grob asked people to hide their emotions when she showed them disgusting images. She even had them hold pens in their mouths to prevent them from frowning. She found that this group reported feeling less disgusted by the pictures than did those who'd been allowed to react naturally. Later, however, the people who hid their emotions suffered side effects. Their memory was impaired, and the negative emotions they'd suppressed seemed to color their outlook. When Grob had them fill in the missing letter to the word "gr_ss", for example, they were more likely than others to offer "gross" rather than "grass". "People who tend to [suppress their negative emotions] regularly," concludes Grob, "might start to see their world in a more negative light." p. 223” - Susan Cain

65. “You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it [dignity]. It's never dignified, always brutal. What's dignified about dying? It's never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it's fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.” - Dave Eggers

66. “For God to prove himself on demand, physically, would be a grave disappointment, and the strongest Christians should be considerably grateful that he chooses not to do so. The skeptic endlessly demands proof, yet God refuses to insult the true intelligence of man, the '6th sense', the chief quality, the acumen which distinguishes man from the rest of creation, faith.” - Criss Jami

67. “Perception is blind to the knowledge that you cannot understand.” - Lionel Suggs

68. “He considered it a shame when people couldn't grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.” - Jess Walter

69. “Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.” - Tan Twan Eng

70. “If you know something is an illusion, why pretend it is reality?” - Lionel Suggs

71. “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

72. “I live in a world where people are guided by limited imagination; only facts that are favorable to them are truths. They are unable to live anyway else. When a person finds out that a fact is against them, it's usually because it's the truth. No one tries to step outside of the edge of reason. No one tries to step beyond the edge of the world.” - Lionel Suggs

73. “An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.” - Pat Conroy

74. “We don't see the world as a botanist who is at the same time an architect, a physician, a geologist, and a ship's captain. Recognizing isn't at all like seeing; the two often don't even agree...” - Sten Nadolny

75. “Your inability to see the wisdom in someone else is not a reflection on their lack of perspicacity, it is a reflection on yours.” - Ilyas Kassam

76. “As humans, reality for us is largely based on other people's perceptions. If there's 20 bodies in your crawl space but you haven't been caught yet, you tell yourself you're still a birthday clown, and that's how you keep doing it.” - Dan Harmon

77. “The revolution of consciousness is connected to the food revolution” - Bryant McGill