"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it."
— David Sedaris

"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"The more I see, the less I know for sure."
— John Lennon

"We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox."
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"If the Doors of Perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it truly is - infinite."
— William Blake

"The limits of my language means the limits of my world."
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

"It's all in the mind."
— George Harrison

"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception."
— Aldous Huxley

"Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious all along?"
— Bernhard Schlink

"What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.
"
— Martha Graham

"One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before."
— Anne Rice (Pandora)

"Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change."
— Dr. Wayne Dyer

"Look. See. Think. Understand. Feel. REACT!"
— ArtReaction.org

"No one else has access to the world you carry around within yourself; you are its custodian and entrance. No one else can see the world the way you see it. No one else can feel your life the way you feel it. Thus it is impossible to ever compare two people because each stands on such different ground. When you compare yourself to others, you are inviting envy into your consciousness; it can be a dangerous and destructive guest."
— John O'Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)

"Always focus on the front windshield and not the review mirror."
— Colin Powell

"Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality...Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense."
— Gary Zukav

"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 is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant."
— Clive Barker

"Most of us go through each day looking for what we saw yesterday And, not surprisingly, that is what we find."
— James A. Kitchens

"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . . "
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In the ultimate stillness
Light penetrates the whole realm;
In the still illumination,
There pervades pure emptiness.
When I look back on the
Phenomenal world,
Everything is just
Like a dream.
"
— Han-shan Te-Ch'ing

"After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?"
— Tad Williams (Sea of Silver Light)

"Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness."
— Philip K. Dick

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see things as they truly are, infinite."
— William Blake

"Because one believes in oneself, one doesn't try to convince others. Because one is content with oneself, one doesn't need others' approval. Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts him or her."
— Lao Tzu

"...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us."
— Rabih Alameddine (The Hakawati)

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

"Without imagination we should be lost; for only with its help can we interpret our experience, turn it into experience of an outer world, and thus make use of it in understanding what and where we are, and what we need to do."
— Mary Warnock (Imagination and Time)

"A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak Electronics, the saftey handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first on the rim and then in the centre of the ashtray.

Which explains how the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present."
— Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel)

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, and so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims?"
— Philip Roth (American Pastoral)

"The very air they breathed was almost a juice."
— Rebecca Wells (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood)

"Why then should witless man so much misweene
That nothing is but that which he hath seene?"
— Edmund Spenser

"'The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary."
— Aldous Huxley (The Devils of Loudun)

"Subhuti, someone might fill innumerable worlds with the seven treasures and give all away in gifts of alms, but if any good man or any good woman awakens the thought of Enlightenment and takes even only four lines from this Discourse, reciting, using, receiving, retaining and spreading them abroad and explaining them for the benefit of others, it will be far more meritorious. Now in what manner may he explain them to others? By detachment from appearances-abiding in Real Truth. -So I tell you-

Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world:

A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;

A flash of lightening in a summer cloud,

A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

When Buddha finished this Discourse the venerable Subhuti, together with the bhikshus, bhikshunis, lay-brothers and sisters, and the whole realms of Gods, Men and Titans, were filled with joy by His teaching, and, taking it sincerely to heart they went their ways."
— Siddhārtha Gautama (Diamond Sutra)

"Land and water are not really separate things, but they are separate words, and we perceive through words."
— David Rains Wallace (Untamed Garden and Other Personal Essays)

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.
"
— Tom Wolfe

"We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are."
— Anais Nin

"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

"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."
— Ruskin, John

"The entire field of particle physics and astrophysics deals with phenomenon we simply cannot perceive with naked eyes. The hypothesis that reality is what humans can perceive is totally and absolutely untenable. Perception is identification and interpretation by the brain of some, but by no means all, signals from the environment."
— Roy J. Mathew (The True Path: Western Science and the Quest for Yoga)

"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

""An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do."
— Russell Hoban (The Medusa Frequency)