Perception Error Quotes

What is madness? To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them.

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

People are drastically overconfident about their judgments of others.

Perception is one millionth of one percent reality (truth in fact).

To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly.

Color deceives continuously.

I'm so suspicious of our own understanding of the past. I just think that your mind plays absolute tricks on you and fools you every minute of every day. And so when you're talking about the past, you're talking about something that never happened. At least it didn't happen the way you think it happened.

No one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.

Your perception plays tricks when you are hoping for something.

And the same things look bent and straight when seen in water and out of it, and also both concave and convex, due to the sight's being mislead by the colors, and every sort of confusion of this kind is plainly in our soul. And, then, it is because they take advantage of this affection in our nature that shadow painting, and puppeteering, and many other tricks of the kind fall nothing short of wizardry.

I am lost if I attempt to take count of chronology. When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.

Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality.

Our senses don't deceive us: our judgment does

When we stand the truth on its head we generally fail to notice that our head is not standing where it should be standing either.

Those oft are stratagems which errors seem Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.

Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.

[The cause of inaction in war] ... is the imperfection of human perception and judgment which is more pronounced in war than anywhere else. We hardly know accurately our own situation at any particular moment while the enemy's, which is concealed from us, must be deduced from very little evidence.

To see a shadow and think it is a tree that is a pity; but to see a tree and to think it a shadow can be fatal.

The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to trurh.

I think that there is a tendency to underestimate the public.

It is therefore correct to say that the senses do not err — not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all.

In intercourse with scholars and artists one readily makes mistakes of opposite kinds: in a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a mediocre man; and often, even in a mediocre artist, one finds a very remarkable man.