All Quotes By Tag: Perception

“Not everything in life comes as we expect”

“Why then should witless man so much misweeneThat nothing is but that which he hath seene?”

“Don’t make listening a chore. It doesn’t have to be hard work. Make it fun. Make it a game. Make it a treasure hunt. What could be more interesting than discovering new things and increasing our powers of perception? Listening is a never-ending journey along an ever-improving road.”

“The master said You must write what you see.But what I see does not move me.The master answered Change what you see.”

“How thin the air felt at the forest’s edge, how ghostly the trees that guarded their realm…. The whole world seemed as delicate as a dandelion seed, and as fleeting…. How sad to know that the figment village of my imagination would not vanish when I ended, to understand that it was not I who had invented the moon the first time I realized how lovely it was. To admit that it was not my breath that made the winds blow…. [M]y heart, my heart knew that when I closed my eyes I invented the night sky and the stars too. Wasn’t the whole dome of the sky the same shape as the inside of my skull? Didn’t I create the sun and the day when I raised my eyelids every morning?”

“It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.”

“While we can learn or study techniques for almost anything we might want to accomplish, real understanding is not the mere accumulation of knowledge. Understanding cannot be realized by listening or reading about the realization of others. It must be achieved firsthand via substantive, direct perception in the moment.”

“I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes of the lepers at Chiengmai gave me the right to talk about it. To have seen! To have been there! Rubbish! The world is not a book, it proves nothing. The spaces one has crossed were dark corridors with closed doors. The faces of the women to whom one gave oneself up completely: did they speak for anyone but themselves? The cities of man are secret. One walks along their streets, one sees them shine under one’s feet, but one is not there, one never enters them. The dusty fields inhabited by people who are hungry, who wait patiently, are paradises of luxury and nourishment; shining at a vast distance from intelligence, at a vast distance from reason. They are not to be subjugated.”

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

“Your agreement with reality defines your life.”

“To witness miracles unfold in your experience, count your blessings and be thankful. Perceived small blessings accumulate to be the most powerful.”

“Perception can be one-sided or variant: “Glass half empty or half full.” There usually is more than one way of perceiving. Thoroughly check your inner dialogue.”

“And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds “joy luck” is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.”

“It doesn’t matter if things are good as long as people think they are. Perception.”

“Life will never get better. It will only get tougher and tougher.But what will really change is, you know? My attitude, will power & perception!”