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      "text": "Odours have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions or will. The persuasive power of an odour cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally.",
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      "text": "All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt that language made any sense at all.",
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      "text": "Nothing contains a greater metaphysical mystery than the fact that a single thing presents two separate sides if you change the direction of your eyes, that a single phenomenon has a hidden \"secret side.\" A long time ago, when I was a child, I would look at a framed painting hanging on the wall and become obsessed with the thought: What kind of world is secretly hidden behind that framed landscape? I often removed the oil painting to peer at its back. This question I had as a child remains for me, an adult today, as an unsolvable mystery.",
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      "text": "Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing. (p26)",
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      "text": "Vision is the process of discovering from images what is present in the world, and where it is.",
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      "text": "The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends.",
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      "text": "Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.",
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      "text": "We cannot grasp any idea, any organ of meditation, we cannot possess it in full force, until we have felt and sensed it, as much so as if it were an odor or a color.",
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      "text": "Not everything we feel is felt powerfully enough to send a message to the brain; the rest of the sensations just wash over us, telling us nothing. Much is lost in translation, or is censored, and in any case our nerves don’t all fire at once. Some of them remain silent while others respond. This makes our version of the world somewhat simplistic, given how complex the world is. The body’s quest isn’t for truth, it’s for survival.",
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      "text": "So much of our life passes in a comfortable blur. Living on the senses requires an easily triggered sense of marvel, a little extra energy, and most people are lazy about life. Life is something that happens to them while they wait for death.",
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      "text": "Out-of-body experiences aim to shed the senses, but they cannot. One may see from a new perspective, but it’s still an experience of vision.",
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      "text": "That evening, as I watched the sunset’s pinwheels of apricot and mauve slowly explode into red ribbons, I thought: The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on.",
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      "text": "In the Bible, God instructs Moses to burn incense sweet and to His liking. Does God have nostrils? How can a god prefer one smell of this earth to another? The rudiments of decay complete a cycle necessary for growth and deliverance. Carrion smells offensive to us, but delicious to those animals who rely on it for food. What they excrete will make the soil rich and the crops abundant. There is no need for divine election. Perception is itself a form of grace.",
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      "text": "The color we see is always the one being reflected, the one that doesn’t stay put and get absorbed. We see the rejected color, and say “an apple is red.” But in truth an apple is everything but red.",
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      "text": "We hallucinate sounds more often than sights. There are auditory mirages, which vanish without trace; auditory illusions that turn out to be something other than they seemed; and, of course, voices that speak to saints, seers, and psychotics, telling them how to act and what to believe.",
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      "text": "\"So what's the point of showing me something I can't see?\" \"So that you understand that just because you see something, it doesn't mean to say it's there. And if you don't see something, it doesn't mean to say it's not there. It's only what your senses bring to your attention.\"",
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      "text": "What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.",
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      "text": "Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?",
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      "text": "All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.",
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      "text": "There is no false sensation.",
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      "text": "Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.",
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      "text": "Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?",
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      "text": "In the following books I have still to speak of the training of a sort of sixth sense, called common-sense, not so much because it is common to all men, but because it results from the well-regulated use of the other five, and teaches the nature of things by the sum-total of their external aspects. So this sixth sense has no special organ, it has its seat in the brain, and its sensations which are purely internal are called percepts or ideas.",
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          "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/the-senses"
        }
      ],
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        "name": "Wikiquote",
        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emile,_or_On_Education#Book_II",
        "license": {
          "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0",
          "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
        }
      },
      "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:39:32"
    },
    {
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      "slug": "we-are-born",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/jean-jacques-rousseau/emile-or-on-education/we-are-born",
      "text": "We are born sensitive and from our birth onwards we are affected in various ways by our environment. As soon as we become conscious of our sensations we tend to seek or shun the things that cause them, at first because they are pleasant or unpleasant, then because they suit us or not, and at last because of judgments formed by means of the ideas of happiness and goodness which reason gives us. These tendencies gain strength and permanence with the growth of reason, but hindered by our habits they are more or less warped by our prejudices. Before this change they are what I call Nature within us.",
      "language": "en",
      "author": {
        "name": "Jean Jacques Rousseau",
        "slug": "jean-jacques-rousseau",
        "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/jean-jacques-rousseau"
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      "book": {
        "title": "Emile; or On Education",
        "slug": "emile-or-on-education",
        "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/jean-jacques-rousseau/emile-or-on-education"
      },
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      "other_languages": [],
      "topics": [
        {
          "name": "superstitions",
          "slug": "superstitions",
          "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/superstitions"
        },
        {
          "name": "the senses",
          "slug": "the-senses",
          "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/the-senses"
        }
      ],
      "source": {
        "name": "Wikiquote",
        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emile,_or_On_Education#Book_I",
        "license": {
          "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0",
          "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
        }
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      "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:39:31"
    },
    {
      "id": "c847cf19-9d4c-4618-a18c-df2c432339f6",
      "slug": "knowledge-is-employed",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/miguel-de-unamuno/tragic-sense-of-life/knowledge-is-employed",
      "text": "Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. The necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear, touch, taste and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch, taste and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common sense.",
      "language": "en",
      "author": {
        "name": "Miguel de Unamuno",
        "slug": "miguel-de-unamuno",
        "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/miguel-de-unamuno"
      },
      "book": {
        "title": "Tragic Sense of Life",
        "slug": "tragic-sense-of-life",
        "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/miguel-de-unamuno/tragic-sense-of-life"
      },
      "character": null,
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      "verified": false,
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      "other_languages": [],
      "topics": [
        {
          "name": "knowledge",
          "slug": "knowledge",
          "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/knowledge"
        },
        {
          "name": "society",
          "slug": "society",
          "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society"
        },
        {
          "name": "the senses",
          "slug": "the-senses",
          "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/the-senses"
        }
      ],
      "source": {
        "name": "Wikiquote",
        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Unamuno#II_:_The_Starting-Point",
        "license": {
          "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0",
          "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
        }
      },
      "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:39:20"
    },
    {
      "id": "ce771890-ba04-4925-ae6a-e73aaf6b3d92",
      "slug": "is-perception-equivalent",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/erica-jong/how-to-save-your-own-life/is-perception-equivalent",
      "text": "Is perception equivalent to existence?",
      "language": "en",
      "author": {
        "name": "Erica Jong",
        "slug": "erica-jong",
        "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/erica-jong"
      },
      "book": {
        "title": "How to Save Your Own Life",
        "slug": "how-to-save-your-own-life",
        "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/erica-jong/how-to-save-your-own-life"
      },
      "character": null,
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      "verified": false,
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      "other_languages": [],
      "topics": [
        {
          "name": "the senses",
          "slug": "the-senses",
          "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/the-senses"
        },
        {
          "name": "existence",
          "slug": "existence",
          "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/existence"
        }
      ],
      "source": {
        "name": "Wikiquote",
        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erica_Jong#How_to_Save_Your_Own_Life_(1977)",
        "license": {
          "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0",
          "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
        }
      },
      "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:38:40"
    }
  ]
}