It is singular that the Japanese, who rarely commit a solecism in taste in their national costume, architecture, or decorative art, seem to be perfectly destitute of perception when they borrow ours.

-Bird, Isabella married name Isabella Bishop
  Unbeaten Tracks in Japan:  An  Account of  Travels on Horseback in the Interior1880 (published1885).

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

-Blake,William
  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 'A Memorable Fancy', plate14.  Aldous Huxley used this phrase as the title of his work The Doors of Perception (1954).

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead.How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception.Youaretheghoul of literature.Lovely.

-DeLillo, Don
  Owen Brademas. The Names, ch.4.

The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art† The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task.

-Dewey,John
  Art as Experience.

   For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception orother, of heat orcold, light or shade, pain or pleasure.I nevercan catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

-Hume, David
  A  Treatise of Human Nature, bk.1, pt.4, section 6.

Down for a new radio, to Ross Lake, and back up. Three days walking. Strange how unmoved this place leaves one; neither articulate or worshipful; rather the pressing need to look within and adjust the mechanism of perception.

-Snyder, Gary Sherman
  Earth House Hold,'Lookout's Journal, Crater Shan 28 July'.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense?

-Thoreau, Henry David
  Walden, or Life in theWoods,'Conclusion'.

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

-Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge)
TheWork,Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, ch.2.

It isn't what he says that counts as a work of art, it's what he makes with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its very own to verify the authenticity.

-Williams,William Carlos
Of the poet. Quoted by Richard Eberhart in the NewYorkTimes, 17 Dec1950.