Psychological Perception Quotes

I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?

You know why the road curves as you're driving along? It curves because if God showed us the distance from where we are to where we’re going, we’d think it was too far.

The sky is no longer out there, but it is right on the edge of the space you are in. The sense of colour is generated inside you. If you then go outside you will see a different coloured sky. You colour the sky.

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

People forget that Mozart wrote for commissions. There's a thing in psychology where they think if it's popular, it can't be serious.

In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases they're not.

Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement.

I think we start suffering as soon as we come out of the womb. I think that people tend to stereotype. When they think of suffering, they think of abuse - physical abuse, emotional abuse, poverty, that kind of thing. There's different levels of suffering. I don't think that it has to do with how much money you have - if you were raised in the ghetto or the Hamptons. For me it's more about perception: self-perception and how you perceive the world.

We both know that, my friend, but a man's perception soon becomes his reality.

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.

When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all.

I recalled the voice I had heard; again I questioned whence it came, as vainly as before: it seemed in me not in the external world. I asked, was it a mere nervous impression a delusion? I could not conceive or believe: it was more like an inspiration.

A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways - by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul.

Frustration is a function of our expectations.

The insane do not share the normal prejudice in favor of external reality.

Oddly my name has been no professional help at all! It seems to have made no difference. I admire him hugely, both for his benevolence and his enormous psychological perception.

Broadly speaking, nervous women may be divided into two classes - those who are really nervous, and those who imagine themselves to be so.

There has been a great gulf in psychological thought between the perception of space and objects on one hand and the perception of meaning on the other.

I feel that my dreamscapes are part of my everyday life, and sometimes I can't tell the difference.

Two seconds are a thousand years.

Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

Pain is superficial, and therefore fear is. The torments of martyrdoms are probably most keenly felt by the by-standers.

It seemed his demon couldn't tell the physical difference between when he was in danger and when he was "in" Danger.

We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today.