#perception

Light is important to us humans. It influences our moods, our perceptions, our energy levels. A face glimpsed among trees, dappled by the shadows and the green-tinged light reflected from the forest, will seem quite different to the same face seen on a beach in hard, dry, sunlight, or in a darkening room at twilight, with the shadows of a venetian blind striped across it like a convict’s uniform. ↗

— John Marsden

#perception

Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives -- envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibted, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do ... They caution[ed] themselves as people do who know they are part of a superior culture: we mustn't let ourselves go, mustn't descend to the level of the ... jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, outback (take your pick). For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it -- then you know. The south has got you. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#culture #north #north-and-south #northerners #perceptions

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. ↗

— Peter Watts

#marketing #memes #perception-of-reality #power #totalitarianism

Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the sun and moon as well as all the pilgrimage places... I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body. ↗

— Saraha

#mysticism #object #perception #saraha #subject

What the joke displays is a switch in perception. This is important in changing the way we think. ↗

— Edward de Bono

#displays #important #joke #perception #switch

It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them. ↗

— Edward de Bono

#attention #changing #how #humor #involved

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; It will never Pass into nothingness. ↗

— John Keats

#beauty

The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always. ↗

— Willa Cather

#afar #always #being #church #coming

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#perception

It's all in the mind. ↗

— George Harrison

#mind #perception #psychology #perception