Familiarity Blindness Quotes

Familiarity so dulls the edge of perception as to make us least acquainted with things forming part of our daily life.

(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.

The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

The things you're closest to are often the things you know least about.

People have set that up as a standard, not to recognize a prophet in his own country.

I think there's a danger of becoming too familiar with things, isn't there? That you kind of, when you're used to seeing the same things every day, you see those things come what may, and you don't see maybe the interesting things just slightly out of view behind them.

There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways.

When I'm in my neighborhood, I don't see anything anymore, because I'm so used to it. When I go somewhere else, suddenly, I'm alive. I'm on alert, and I can be fresh.

The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all

In our judgment of human transactions, the law of optics is reversed; we see the most indistinctly the objects which are close around us.

Original minds are not distinguished by being the first to see a new thing, but instead by seeing the old, familiar thing that is over-looked as something new.

One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.

The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people.

There is probably nothing like living together for blinding people to each other.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

The only reason we don't notice how absolutely interwoven our thinking processes have become with older technologies - pencils, paper, electric light, penicillin, fire - is that they're old, so we've ceased to notice their effects.