c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I was Juliet and Quinn was Romeo, and the lines weren't dead black-and-white words on a page but somehow alive, as natural and real as the argument we'd had about the spider and the fly. The rows of empty seats were gone, and we were in a candlelit ballrooom, wrapped in our own cocoon of words. But the playful banter of our words couldn't mask what we both knew--that after this, nothing would be the same .And then we got to the kissing part, which we'd only read through together and had never really rehearsed. But it didn't matter, because I was still Juliet and Quinn was still Romeo, his gray-green eyes fixed on mine. And when he bent to kiss me, it was Romeo's lips on Juliet's. Even so, Juliet was just as stunned as I would've been. When I said the last line, I was speaking for both of us. You kiss by the book.
— Jennifer Sturman
I didn't know what to say when someone's given you a small free kiss in the dark ...
— Glenda Millard, A Small Free Kiss in the Dark
I can't today," I said. "Maybe tomorrow?""Can't tomorrow," said Quinn. "I have a family thing. I guess we're logistically star-crossed, Juliet."Sometimes Quinn calls me Juliet because of how we had to do that scene together, and whenever he does it's good for another bout of brain paralysis. So all I could manage back was "Oh.""But I'll talk to you later, okay?" he said.I didn't even try to say anything else but just nodded, wondering as I did what would happen next. The steps had largely emptied by then.But before I could do much wondering, Quinn's lips were on mine.And this time it definitely counted.
— Jennifer Sturman
He turned to me. “Call me later?”“Yes.”“Promise?”“I promise,” I said.And then he leaned down and kissed me. And this time it wasn’t Romeo kissing Juliet. It was Quinn kissing Delia. And that was even better.
— Jennifer Sturman
I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
There exists, for everyone, a sentence - a series of words - that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you're lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.
— Philip K. Dick, VALIS
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought.
— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A drop of ink may make a million think.
— George Gordon Byron
Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
— Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing
There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.
— E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley
of all the weapons of destruction that man could invent, the most terrible-and the most powerful-was the word. Daggers and spears left traces of blood; arrows could be seen at a distance. Poisons were detected in the end and avoided. But the word managed to destroy without leaving clues.
— Paulo Coelho
A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.
— Neil Gaiman
But words are more powerful than anything.
— Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light
The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.
— Francis Bacon
What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered and our infancy remembered but in fragments. We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance of ourselves, and this is much.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
That is the power of a good story. It can encourage you, it can make you laugh, it can bring you joy. It will make you think, it will tap innto your hidden emotions, and it can make you cry. The power of a story can also bring about healing, give you peace, and change your life!" (p.15)
— Jeff Dixon, The Key to the Kingdom: Unlocking Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom
Words have power? That sounds like you're into some Harry Potter juju.
— Chloe Neill, Firespell
If words can be lethal weapons, I must provide them with an arsenal.
— Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
Words shall not be hidnor spells buriedmight shall not sink undergroundthough the mighty go.
— Elias Lönnrot, The Kalevala
Reading and writing dangerous books lets me be who I can't be and say what I can't say in everyday life.
— Carla H. Krueger
What avail is honour or a sword against a pen?
— Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook's Hill
There is just too much cruelty, selfishness and corruption in the world not to want to crush the poisonous will of those who cause it by writing about it as powerfully as I can.
— Carla H. Krueger
The words sink and rise along the streets, are breathed in and out by the citizens, are pressed like bombs into the hands of the children, and thrown against the walls of the city. And the walls of the world tremble and shudder. And the walls of the world fall down.
— Nike Sulway, Letters to Tiptree
Look in the mirror and see the President in you.
— Kevin Abdulrahman, The Book on What Ever You're Into: These Are the 52 Timeless Winning Truths You Need to Know to Have a Chance at Winning
Human communication and literature are all made of words; thus, it’s hard to overestimate their unbelievable power.
— Sahara Sanders
Look up to know you got up from below!
— Viorel Muha
Words are the timeless beauties; they tell a thousand stories, deliver your purpose, speak the heart and build character. The play and interaction of words amuse me, hence the power of words is my love.
— Sharlene Leong
Names have power... And he kept the one I gave him. My dear, sweet Jackaby. - Eleanor
— William Ritter
You are your own best friend. Listen to yourself more often than someone else.
— Steven Cuoco
And not only narrativity but the quality of the writing is of the first importance to me. Rightly or not, I believe a dull, inept style signals poverty or incompleteness of thought. I see the accuracy, scope, and quality of Darwin’s intellect directly expressed in the clarity, strength, and vitality of his writing — the beauty of it.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just don’t understand. And incomprehension is boredom.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
Men still have everything to say about their sexuality, and everything to write. For what they have said so far, for the most part, stems from the opposition activity/passivity, from the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meantto invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of woman as a “darkcontinent” to penetrate and to “pacify.” (We know what “pacify” means in terms ofscotomizing the other and misrecognizing the self.) Conquering her, they’ve madehaste to depart from her borders, to get out of sight, out of body. The way man hasof getting out of himself and into her whom he takes not for the other but for hisown, deprives him, he knows, of his own bodily territory. One can understandhow man, confusing himself with his penis and rushing in for the attack, mightfeel resentment and fear of being “taken” by the woman, of being lost in her,absorbed, or alone.
— Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
They go to Paris to learn how to make bombs and they come back having learned only how to write poetry, which they think is more explosive.
— Rana Dasgupta, Solo
I danced with my shadows until they became part of my light.
— Jodi Livon
we only shout when we neglect what silence can do
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
The power to shape your reality lies within you, therefore the most important voice you will ever hear is your own.
— Max Patrick
If you spend a hundred bucks, or more, to go to the theatre, something should happen to you. Maybe somebody should be asking you some questions about your values, or about the way you think about things. Maybe you should come out of the theatre, something having happened to you. Maybe you should be changing, or thinking about changing. But if you just go there, and the only thing you worry about is where you left the damn car, then you wasted a hundred bucks.
— Edward Albee
Be careful of what you allow your mind to dwell on. And the words that come out of your mouth.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
If you spend a hundred bucks, or more, to go to the theatre, something should happen to you. Maybe somebody should be asking you some questions about your values, or about the way you think about things. Maybe you should come out of the theatre, something haven happened to you. Maybe you should be changing, or thinking about changing. But if you just go there, and the only thing you worry about is where you left the damn car, then you wasted a hundred bucks.
— Edward Albee
Be careful of what you dwell on and what you say. Your thoughts and words will either acquit or condemn you.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Deliver your message with simplicity and see how powerful impact it has on the audience.
— Sujish Kandampully
Every word comes from the heart.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I understand the sacred words of the sacred souls.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Words. Ever since chisel was taken to slate, it has been accepted that words can and do change the world.
— LIFE Magazine, 100 Photographs That Changed the World
You should always be your greatest motivator. Never leave that power in someone else’s hands. Once you learn to love the person you are, there are no limits to the person you can become.
— Carlos Wallace, Life Is Not Complicated-You Are: Turning Your Biggest Disappointments Into Your Greatest Blessings
Words and love together can more often achieve what magic cannot.
— Mercedes Lackey
Words create. Know what you want to create before you speak
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom
And for the next long years of my life, I tried to remember only the reading, not the terrible things that happened to me as I came and went up and down the stairs. The library became my sanctuary. I loved the ways the precious stories took shape but always had room to be read again. I became fascinated with how writers did that. How did they make a story feel so complete and yet to open-ended? It was like painting a picture that changed each time you looked at it.
— Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted
If you can train yourself to be actionable instead of reactionary, you will break out of the negative space that is typically furnished with fear, uncertainty and inaction, and move into that peaceful zone of determination, power, decisiveness and growth. Life will become less complicated.
— Carlos Wallace, Life Is Not Complicated-You Are: Turning Your Biggest Disappointments Into Your Greatest Blessings
Soon, there was nothing but scraps of words littered between her legs and all around her. Ther words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this. Without words, the Fuhrer was nothing. There would be no limping prisoners, no need for consolation or wordly tricks to make us feel better.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
The power of words to deceive is a danger far exceeding any we might encounter from physical weapons. Sticks and stones can break bones! But words can lead worlds into ruin!
— Steve Bivans, Be a Hobbit, Save the Earth: the Guide to Sustainable Shire Living
Celebrate your day of birthday as special day.Make a specific birthday wishes and write it down.You will be amazed about the power of pen and inner strength to accomplish the wishes.This will be a special gift for yourself on each birthday.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.
— Diane Setterfield
The gift of writing
—  natural flow of thoughts from the deepest heart.
Ill gotten power, money knowledge and qualifications will vanish faster than realized
— Dr.T.V.Rao MD
Make a promise to yourself right now, that you will choose your thoughts and words wisely, that you will no longer use disempowered language about yourself, and nor will you ever negatively define yourself by what has occurred in your past.
— Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
That was originally what I had loved him for: that at a period when our native land was nude and crude and provincial, when the famous 'atmosphere' it is supposed to lack was not even missed, when literature was lonely there and art and form akmost impossible, he had found the means to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid; to feel, understand, and express everything.
— Henry James, The Aspern Papers
I like slang words, straight to the point. I like words of wisdom, straight to the heart.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
In the dim, wavering light, a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather, the words delicately painted thereon. In all the rush and fervor, Montag had only an instant to read a line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute as if stamped there with fiery steel.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
He had never clearly fathomed the true weight of a word of good, truth, and purity cast in the stream of human speech and the deep bend it cut in it. Nor had he thought that a word spoken boldly and loudly, with no hint of false shame, but rather with courage, that this word would not drown in the ugly cries of fashionable satyrs but would plunge like a pearl into the abyss of public life and always find itself a shell.Many stumble over a good word, blushing in embarrassment, and utter a careless word boldly and loudly, never suspecting that it, too, unfortunately, will not go for naught but will leave a long trail of often times ineradicable evil.p. 296
— Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
God answers all prayers, but sometimes his answer is 'no'! And you may become upset because he said no. But open up your eyes and look around at the things he said yes to.
— Jerome D. Williams
Words provide a voice to our deepest feelings. I tell you, words have started and stopped wars. Words have built and lost fortunes. Words have saved and taken lives. Words have won and lost great kingdoms. Even Buddha said, 'Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care, for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.
— Camron Wright, The Rent Collector
Now let's take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Words have longer lives than people.
— Mary E. Pearson, Fox Forever
Assuming is a form of giving away your power to another regarding an outcome that concerns you.
— Molly Friedenfeld, The Book of Simple Human Truths
The word and the image mutually excluded each other. Joseph was a literary man to his very marrow
—  he put faith in the invisible Word
What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.
— C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.
— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
— Aldous Huxley
You used," he said, and then took a sharp breath, "to call me Augustus.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?I make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true.
— Terry Pratchett
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.
— José Saramago, The Double
The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend
— Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.
— Anne Rice, Pandora
Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed
We all see only that which we are trained to see.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati
The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
A thing of beauty is a joy forever:Its loveliness increases
— It will neverPass into nothingness.
A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.
— Mignon McLaughlin, The Complete Neurotic's Notebook
Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.""I don't believe in ghosts," I said, faintly."Some people can't see the color red. That doesn't mean it isn't there," she replied.
— Sue Grafton, M is for Malice
That is certainly one way to look at the matter. There are others.
— Patricia C. Wrede, Thirteenth Child
There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures
You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Surely you ain't weak.You just can't accept yourself as a strong person.
— Toba Beta
O, wad some Power the giftie gie usTo see oursels as others see us!It wad frae monie a blunder free us,An' foolish notion.
— Robert Burns, The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Burns
I won't do this movie because I don't believe the love story," she told Selznick. "The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can't fall in love so deeply.
— Ingrid Bergman
Have you thought about what it means to be a god?" asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. "It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Unity is vision
—  it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
Your desire to advise other people, grows in line with your perception...that assumes you're wiser than them.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and what it saw in a plain way. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion--all in one.
— John Ruskin
[she used to say that] each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world – like a bride wears on her wedding day—except this kind of veil is invisible. we walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. the world is kind of blurry. we like it that way. but sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments – like there’s a wind blowing it from our faces – and when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. we see all the beauty and cruelty and sadness and love, but mostly we are happy not to. some people learn to lift the veils themselves. then they don’t have to depend on the wind anymore. ...it’s just her way of saying that most of the time people get distracted by little stuff, and ignore the big stuff.
— Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me
Recognizing isn't at all like seeing
—  the two often don't even agree.
You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your perception...you see what is, where most people see what they expect.
— Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.
— Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
Perception is subjective.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Internal mental experience is not the product of a photographic process. Internal reality is in fact constructed by the brain as it interacts with the environment in the present, in the context of its past experiences and expectancies of the future. At the level of perceptual categorizations, we have reached a land of mental representations quite distant from the layers of the world just inches away from their place inside the skull. This is the reason why each of us experiences a unique way of minding the world. (pp. 166-167)
— Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are
You can see a rose both in two ways. First, through its beautiful petals. The other, through its thorns
— Aries Eroles
The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.
— Marilynne Robinson
The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.
— Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
When your heart truly adores somebody, your mind perceives a halo on that man's head.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
— W.H. Auden, Selected Essays
Even if you have not awakened, if you realize that your perceptions and activities are all like dreams and you view them with detachment, not giving rise to grasping and rejecting discrimination, then this is virtually tantamount to awakening from the dream.
— Muso Kokushi
I walked home, seeing all my doubt from the other side. Have you ever seen that? Like when you go on holiday. On the way back, everything is the same but it looks a little different than it did on the way. It's because you're seeing it backwards.
— Markus Zusak, Underdog
Here's something else I'd like your opinion about," I said. "If he went back underground and sat down again in the same spot, wouldn't the sudden transition from the sunlight mean that his eyes would be overwhelmed by darkness?" "Certainly," he replied. "Now, the process of adjustment would be quite long this time, and suppose that before his eyes had settled down and while he wasn't seeing well, he had once again to compete against those same old prisoners at identifying those shadows. Would he make a fool of himself? Wouldn't they say that he'd come back from his upward journey with his eyes ruined, and that it wasn't even worth trying to go up there? And would they -- if they could -- grab hold of anyone who tried to set them free and take them up there and kill him?
— Plato, The Republic
You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.
— Herb Cohen
Stubborness and staunch, they are both same thingsfrom different point of view, such crazy and eccentric.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
When our poor, faultily sensitive vision can perceive a thing, we say that it is visible. When the nerves of touch can feel it, we say that it is tangible. Yet I tell you there are beings intangible to our physical sense, yet whose presence is felt by the spirit, and invisible to our eyes merely because those organs are not attuned to the light as reflected from their bodies. But light passed through the screen, which we are about to use has a wavelength novel to the scientific world, and by it you shall see with the eyes of the flesh that which has been invisible since life began. Have no fear! ("Unseen - Unfeared")
— Francis Stevens, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
What is seen by mind, is an environmental image that projected by public consciousness in vicinity.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
With growing disbelief, Jess yet again felt herself slipping into the gap - that gap of perception between what is really happening to a person and what others think is happening.
— Helen Oyeyemi
Attending church does not necessarily mean living the principles taught in those meeting. You can be active in a church but inactive in its gospel.
— Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
Shallan’s mental image of Jasnah Kholin was of someone almost divine. It was, upon reflection, an odd way to regard a determined atheist.
— Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance
Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. At the edge of perception, weird things dance and howl.
— M.H. Boroson, The Girl with Ghost Eyes
I brought a picture with me that I had at home, of a girl in a swing with a castle and pretty blue bubbles in the background, to hang in my room, but that nurse here said the girl was naked from the waist up and not appropriate. You know, I've had that picture for fifty years and I never knew she was naked. If you ask me, I don't think the old men they've got here can see well enough to notice that she's bare-breasted. But, this is a Methodist home, so she's in the closet with my gallstones.
— Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
To analyze or assess a person's failings or deficiencies,' he declared to himself, 'is useless, not because such blemishes are immovable, but because they affect the mass of beholders in diverse ways. Different minds perceive utterly variant figures in the same being.
— A.E. Coppard, Dusky Ruth: And Other Stories
[A]s military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan.
— Adam Gopnik
An hour later we were walking past rows of busy beach huts and weaving between sunbathers and Frisbee games. I was surprised that people weren't taking more notice of us. Everyone looked so strange to me that I couldn't believe I didn't look equally strange to them.
— Alex Garland, The Beach
Perceiving the world as well designed and thus the product of a designer, and even seeing divine providence in the daily affairs of life, may be the product of a brain adapted to finding patterns in nature. (38)
— Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design
There is no single thing... that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says 'I am more than just my appearance'. If each object quivers with readiness to imply something other than itself, if each perception is a word in a poem dense with connotations, then the poet's selection of any given subject of speculation will become... a means of attuning himself to the rhythms and harmonies of reality at large. ... The notion of a network of correspondence is not an outmoded Romantic illusion: it represents a crucial intuition...
— Roger Cardinal, Figures of Reality
A blind man sees with his cane, like all the rest of us.
— Marty Rubin
Great men look greater than yesterday.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of his victim to become a real test for him; since he had quite put it to himself from the first that, oh distinctly! he could "cultivate" his whole perception. He had felt it as above all open to cultivation--which indeed was but another name for his manner of spending his time. He was bringing it on, bringing it to perfection, by practice; in consequence of which it had grown so fine that he was now aware of impressions, attestations of his general postulate, that couldn't have broken upon him at once.
— Henry James, The Jolly Corner
What matters finally is how we feel about ourselves. After all, to a worm we're just food.
— Marty Rubin
Nothing iseternal.Everything elseis not.
— Will Advise
The whole world had given up on love anyway and clung instead to its malformed cousins: lust, narcissism, self-interest.
— Leslye Walton, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
Just remember that in most things, right or wrong depends on where you’re standing at the moment. My father’s people would have thought having your life’s mate picked out for you by your parents to be … well, barbaric.” As Talon’s expression started to darken, Caleb added, “No offense intended, but I’m pointing out that things look the way they do because that is how you were taught as a child. And the rest of the world is vastly different from what a child can imagine.
— Raymond E. Feist, Talon of the Silver Hawk
When he passed me in the restaurant," he said at last, "I had a curious impression. It was as though a wild animal – an animal savage, but savage! you understand – had passed me by.""And yet he looked altogether of the most respectable.""Précisément! The body – the cage – is everything of the most respectable – but through the bars, the wild animal looks out.""You are fanciful, mon vieux," said M. Bouc. "It may be so. But I could not rid myself of the impression that evil had passed me by very close." (1.2.52-56)
— Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express
Within weeks of my arrival in New York, I was someone else, not because there had been a revolution in my psychological makeup or any trauma. It was simply this: people saw me in a light in which I had never been seen before.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.” He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate.The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community—then it may not be seen as a trauma. The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it resides in the event’s psychological construal. It’s for this reason, Bonanno told me, that “stressful” or “traumatic” events in and of themselves don’t have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. “The prospective epidemiological data shows that exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning,” he said. “It’s only predictive if there’s a negative response.” In other words, living through adversity, be it endemic to your environment or an acute negative event, doesn’t guarantee that you’ll suffer going forward. What matters is whether that adversity becomes traumatizing.
— Maria Konnikova
There is nothing called as truth, it's just your new perception
— Harrish Sairaman
Abbey relaxed, grateful not only that someone had thought to throw a party for her, but that she had been able to escape attending.
— Emily Ann Benedict, Perception
I can't settle for merely liking a man when I've known what it’s like to love one.
— Emily Ann Benedict, Perception
Why judge when it's only a matter of perception.
— Haresh Sippy
Don’t be imprisoned by others perception of reality.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is A Cocktail
Perception shows how deep one can understand an issue or a phenomenon, the mental strength.
— Pearl Zhu, 100 Creativity Ingredients: Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity
Sometimes I wonder, how different life would have been if everything was based upon perception. No struggle to find the truth, just a believe build upon what we see. Sun could be a ball, Earth would have been flat and I would have eaten Sun using my ice candy as a chopstick.
— Swati Verma
People can find patterns in all kinds of random events. It's called apophenia. It's the tendency we humans have to find meaning in disconnected information.
— Dan Chaon, Ill Will
People say the darkness is where secrets are best hidden. Night time brings clarity and focus to owls, even if the aperture of this vision comes with a stigma.
— Kimberly Morgan, On Angels and Rabbit Holes
Our only reality is our perception of reality.
— Ruth Sanford, Experiences in Relatedness: Groupwork and the Person-Centred Approach
To Declare Your Stand For Righteousness Is Not To Regard The Perception Of Others
— Sunday Adelaja
You look up for a moment and you're not sure which life is real. You've split yourself into so many honeycombed parts that they barely notice each other---all of them pacing, concurrently, parallel streams of though, and each one thinks of its self as me.
— Dan Chaon, Ill Will
What we see depends mainly on what we look for
— John Lubbock
Where would I be (and what would happen to me), if I could see all round me and above and below at once ?
— Nanamoli Thera
The modern tendency towards increasing specialization in all branches of research and scholarship has discouraged comparative studies of the arts; and what we seldom do we generally distrust. But our distrust of analogies was not shared by the sixteenth century, which inherited from antiquity a habit of drawing parallels as a matter of course.
— John Shearman, Mannerism
Amongst all the colours in this multicoloured world, even jet black has its reserved place.
— Priyavrat Thareja
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite.
— William Blake
But, then, the truest perceptions of life, for me at least, have always proved to be the most elusive and the most shortlived
— Arun Joshi, The Strange Case of Billy Biswas
For until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms - as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music, as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses, in nature, of Wordsworth's 'something far more deeply interfused'; as systematic silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an 'obscure knowledge'. But now I knew contemplation at its height.
— Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
I am often told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but also there can be no reason to assume that the result of doing it in these times will give us the balanced picture it gave in Dante's. Dante lived in the thirteenth century, when that balance was achieved by the faith of his age. We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
I'd rather be judged on what I can do instead of who I'm not.
— Jennifer Niven, American Blonde
His face had been twisted into an expression of every agony he had imagined for his friend.
— Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Often we don’t see the majesty of God’s design because we’re caught up in the mediocrity of our own designs.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Like to hear a vampire folk tale?" Sarasti asked."Vampires have folk tales?"He took it for a yes. "A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.
— Peter Watts, Blindsight
Resting beside her, he seemed to Ildiko a living statue, carved from dark granite into a form of supple elegance and power. He was beautiful, and the tremor change in her perception of him robbed her lungs of air.He opened both eyes suddenly, making her jump. Two shimmering gold coins stared at her unblinking. "Good evening, wife," he said in a voice raspy with the remnants of sleep. A closed-lip smile curved his mouth upward and deepened the tiny lines that fanned from the corners of his eyes. "You're staring. Do I have a fly on my nose?"Fighting down a blush at being caught gawking at her own husband, Ildiko lightly tapped the tip of his nose with one finger. "I was trying to find a way to kill it without punching you in the face. Lucky for you, it flew away.
— Grace Draven, Radiance
Accidents happen. That's what everyone says. But in a quantum universe there are no such things as accidents, only possibilities and probabilities folded into existence by perception.
— J. Michael Straczynski, Before Watchmen: Nite Owl/Dr. Manhattan
The problem that I think I have with God is often not a problem at all. Rather, it is most frequently a tired misperception where I have made God what I need Him to be in order to justify my rejection of Him.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
How people perceive your brand will determine how they will receive your brand
— Bernard Kelvin Clive
Your perception will determine your reception
— Bernard Kelvin Clive
How a Brand is received is determined by how it's perceived
— Bernard Kelvin Clive
Notwithstanding how good you are, you shall be perceived as bad by the masses when you take the extraordinary steps that lead to distinctiveness which the masses may regard as bad
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
We live in the shadows of perception. Our dull awareness gives us no useful clues as to why we are here.
— R.A.Delmonico
A creative person is one who has insight, who can see things nobody else has ever seen before, who hears things that nobody has heard before—then there is creativity.
— Osho, Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within
Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in 
— Tennessee Williams
There spoke the race!" he said; "always ready to claim what it hasn't got, and mistake its ounce of brass filings for a ton of gold-dust. You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things--broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution-- these can lift at a colossal humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.
— Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating in us.
— Sigmund Freud
We're eye doctors.""What's something about the eye that most people don't realize?""The eye doesn't see. The brain sees. The eye just transmits. So what we see isn't only determined by what comes through the eyes. What we see is affected by our memories, our feelings, and by what we've seen before.
— Brandon Stanton
The belief that others think they are right doesn't mean that they are.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is Simply A Game
People missed things. People didn’t notice; people didn’t care. People’s own misperceptions made black into white, made grey into whatever they wanted it to be.
— Judith Ivory
While your beliefs may change over time, the truth will not
— Lenon Honor
Horace, like all dogs, heard dead-voices quite often, and sometimes saw their owners. The dead were all around, but living people saw them no more than they could smell most of the ten thousand aromas that surrounded them every minute of every day.
— Stephen King, Under the Dome
Did you?' the producer said. 'He's so clownish on the surface, all joke and dazzle. How in the world could you have seen it?''But I did. The moment I met him," she said. "A fucking supernova. Every day since.' She thought, but did not say, almost.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.
— William Blake
Mathilde saw her own face reflected in the window, but no, it was a barn owl on a low branch in the cherry trees. She could barely master herself. She had never expected this. These women, such kindness, their eyes shining in the dim room. They saw her. She didn't know why, but they saw her, and they loved her even still.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
When you see something that is wrong, there is something that has to be right.
— J.R. Rim
The past is gone, and tomorrow is an illusion. There is only now.
— William Donelson
People are entitled to different opinions and views. Just because somebody doesn't agree with you doesn't mean they're wrong. Within the context of their reality they feel just as right, as you do within the context of your reality. Appreciate and respect that and perhaps in time you'll find even ground.
— Deon Potgieter
It's tempting to think of red for sun," she said, "but it has to be just a dash, not much. More of a dark orange and a hint of brown. And then white on yellow on white. Not bright white,' she said. 'The kind of white that makes you squint, but in a softer way...''Go look at fire for a while. Go spend some time with fire.'Looking at fire was interesting, I have to admit. I sat with a candle for a couple hours. It has these stages of color: the white, the yellow, the red, the tiny spot of blue I'd heard mentioned but never noticed.
— Aimee Bender, The Color Master: Stories
But rock, of course, is many colors. The distinction is subtle, but it is not just one plain grey, that I can promise...I spent five hours one afternoon just staring at a rock trying to see into its color scheme.
— Aimee Bender, The Color Master: Stories
I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness.
— Saul Bellow, Herzog
Truth is a broken mirror, but it can still help anyone to see clearly.
— Amy Neftzger, The War of Words
The things you say, the things you don't say, the things you do, or the things you don't do are always sending a loud message to those around you. What kind of a message are you sending? Is it a true reflection of who you are?
— Lindsey Rietzsch, Successful Failures: Recognizing the Divine Role That Opposition Plays in Life's Quest for Success
You’ll always come back to warn him, no matter how much danger it could put you in, no matter what it costs you, because he cared for you when you thought you were nothing. You were never nothing. That didn’t matter. Perception is everything in this world
— Seanan McGuire, The Winter Long
Think about people in your own life who you have envied for one reason or another. It may surprise you to know that they do not see themselves the way that you do. Maybe they are all smiles on the outside but have personal struggles and trials that you would never guess from first glance.
— Lindsey Rietzsch, Successful Failures: Recognizing the Divine Role That Opposition Plays in Life's Quest for Success
Nobody would have been able to understand the depth of my joy and the extent of my happiness unless they had themselves gone through what I just had.
— Preeti Shenoy, Life is What You Make It: A Story of Love, Hope and How Determination Can Overcome Even Destiny
. . . I'm not pretty, not close up anyway. Generally, the closer people get to me the less hot they find me.
— Margo Roth Spiegelman
You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Despair
An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pierglass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, the candle is the egoism of any party now absent.
— George Eliot
The author found participants in a study able to come up with more reasons to support their position but not anymore likely to change their minds based on contradictory evidence. In effect, they enlist their IQ on behalf of their instincts.
— Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
The poets have taught us how full of wonders is the night; and the night of blindness has its wonders, too. The only lightless dark is the night of ignorance and insensibility. We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond our senses.
— Helen Keller
Who teaches young people to be so exquisitely sensitive to perceived slights, so ready to read affronts into routine events in everyday life? Their teachers no doubt.
— George F. Will, The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America's Fabric
The world, I soon learned, held a different estimate: and I make no doubt, the world is very right in its view, yet believe also that I am not quite wrong in mine.
— Charlotte Brontë, Villette
It is not what happens to us that causes our pain and suffering, it is our thinking pattern and perception of our experiences that create our reality and contribute to our well-being or suffering
— Renee Cefalu
Perception is the reality in the absence of fact.
— Pieter BF Swart