Shallan’s mental image of Jasnah Kholin was of someone almost divine. It was, upon reflection, an odd way to regard a determined atheist.

It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It...

At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her...

It wasn’t the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. […] It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed...

When I win, it’s because I’m skilled. When I lose, it’s because my opponent is lucky. But when I fall in love, it’s because I’m lucky and she’s skilled.

Happiness is an inner perception, inner joyfulness. We are happy when we express our kindness unconditionally. We are happy when we love some one unconditionally. By becoming the source of happiness for some one we...

For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique.

In fine, that it is not enough to be good, without behaving in such a manner as shall make others acknowledge us to be so.

It’s just that you’re about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to...

I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes...

What would beauty be if the whole world were blind?

But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.

I have seen a face with a thousand countenances, and a face that was but a single countenance as if held in a mould. I have seen a face whose sheen I could look through...

Believing the phenomenon of karma is placing your destiny in the hands of the devil.

A child of repeated infinity.

It takes one to know one” when they become lost I condemnation and judgment of others. The world that we perceive is a reflection of our own states of mind and reveals our own level...

We don’t see the world as a botanist who is at the same time an architect, a physician, a geologist, and a ship’s captain. Recognizing isn’t at all like seeing; the two often don’t even...

The thing of which the act of perception is the perception is experienced as something not mental.

Sometimes a loved one might not ‘spit’ the message in the most tender or poetic fashion that suits you, but don’t allow a rugged style to blind you from a loving intent. It’s the spirit...

People do not change, only expression and perception changes.

The wise do not buy into other people’s perceptions of who they are and what they are capable of. Instead, they bypass a person’s public persona and see who they are in their highest expression....

Wow,” a lot. Part of the brain exists to stop this from happening.

There are many realities. There are many versions of what may appearobvious. Whatever appears as the unshakeable truth, its exact oppositemay also be true in another context. After all, one’s reality is butperception, viewed through...

I’m a human being and I’ve got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that he doesn’t know is there, and he’ll never know what’s there because he’s stupid. I suppose you’ll laugh at...

People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.

Christ delves far beyond the means of superficiality, not simply because of his immaculate love, but also because he considers the distinct cases of each individual rather than withholding a broadened perception by use of...

Too often, it is only love that makes us engaged enough, alert enough, alive enough to see

Your self-image tells about what you think about yourself and how you appear to yourself in your own consciousness. Self-image is the picture of yourself carried in your own mind. That picture can scare you...

Secularity is a way of being dependent on the responses of our milieu. The secular or false self is the self which is fabricated, as Thomas Merton says, by social compulsions. ‘Compulsive’ is indeed the...

Reality is how you look at it

People who want to climb mountains just like taking metaphors for real. So when I say I could murder for a mangosteen, I hope you don’t think I’m going to go out and do that.

Yet if women are so flighty, fickle, changeable, susceptible, and inconstant (as some clerks would have us believe), why is it that their suitors have to resort to such trickery to have their way with...

Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if...

I find that there are a lot of objects and subjects within the world today. There’s so much going on, that it seems like reality itself is trying hide something. Not only do we have...

Unfortunately, our minds are our greatest assets, and our biggest flaws.

You could try making sense out of the universe, but you were too small and the parts you needed to see were too large or even smaller.

Why would you want to appear as one thing and be another? If you are a warrior then you are a warrior and if you are not a warrior then you are not a warrior....

The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.

Grey has no agenda. . . . Grey has the ability, that no other colour has, to make the invisible visible.

…human beings have a distorted view of risk. They don’t see the whole picture. Our perceptions are twisted by stories in the media, by films, by our own personalities and experiences. So, despite the unlikely...

We all see only that which we are trained to see.

Be like the flower, content with its nature.

Perception was easily accomplished, required little effort, and it never had to stand the test of reality.

If I make a fool of myself, who cares? I’m not frightened by anyone’s perception of me.

We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.

Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest...

How good something is should never be determined by its cost, designer, origin, or its perceived value by others.

As humans, reality for us is largely based on other people’s perceptions. If there’s 20 bodies in your crawl space but you haven’t been caught yet, you tell yourself you’re still a birthday clown, and...

When you no longer perceive the world as hostile, there is no more fear, and when there is no more fear, you think, speak and act differently.

All humans are alike and all humans are equal. It is just the perception of the eye that sees any different.