When somewhat at a distance, I cannot hear the high tones of instruments, voices. In speaking, it is not surprising that there are people who have never noticed it, for as a rule I am absent-minded, and they account for it in that way.

September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That’s all to the good.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

‚Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

I have to be seen to be believed.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I’ve always thought it isn’t that different from everybody else’s.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.

I was ill, and everyone could see it but me.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

I think the perception of peace is what distracts most people from really having it.

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

It amazes me sometimes that even intelligent people will analyze a situation or make a judgement after only recognizing the standard or traditional structure of a piece.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia – to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.

People wonder aloud about whether I am an okay mother. That is obviously painful because it’s so important to me. It’s hard to hear that people think I’m not a capable mother and a good person, that they just think I’m nuts.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

Just as the soul fills the body, so God fills the world. Just as the soul bears the body, so God endures the world. Just as the soul sees but is not seen, so God sees but is not seen. Just as the soul feeds the body, so God gives food to the world.

Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.

The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor.

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

A lot of people think I’m a comedian.

People see things differently and remember things differently. It’s why if somebody robs a liquor store and there are four witnesses they’ll often disagree.

There’s no way to remove the observer – us – from our perceptions of the world.

More than anything else, I want the folks back at home to think right of me.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

When you read, I’m sure you don’t realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don’t do that.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

I don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.

El Salvador is a democracy so it’s not surprising that there are many voices to be heard here. Yet in my conversations with Salvadorans… I have heard a single voice.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

They’re right to think that about me, because I’m the person most likely to sleep with my female fans, I genuinely love other women. And I think they know that.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

When people meet me, they say that I’m really kind – contrary to a lot of my music.

The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.