William S. Burroughs Quotes

Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

Harry Potter isn’t real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Is this video blog real? Am I real if you can see me and hear me, but only through the internet? Are you real if I can read your comment but I don’t know who you are or what your name is or where you’re from or what you look like or how old you are? I know all of those things about Harry Potter. Maybe Harry Potter’s real and you’re not.

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.

What people believe prevails over the truth.

We look and see what we see in a mirror, and we believe it. That's important, the question of belief. The question is: Should we believe what we see in a mirror?

I had the pleasure of meeting that young man at the Patriarch's Ponds. He almost drove me mad myself, proving to me that I don't exist. But you do believe that it is really I?

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

For me, the world that I inhabit in reality is probably a very different world than the one people expect that I would be in.

People live their lives bound by what they accept as correct and true. That’s how they define Reality. But what does it mean to be “correct” or “true”? Merely vague concepts… Their Reality may all be a mirage. Can we consider them to simply be living in their own world, shaped by their beliefs?

The first lesson about trusting your senses is: don't. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true.

The dead see what they believe they will see. So do the living. That is the secret.

Behold your world! The judgments you believe just created it.

It’s critical that we know what we believe, no matter what we feel...that we know what is true, no matter what we see.

If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.

The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.

There is always a divergence between our perception and what actually exists.

Reality! But what does this word mean? Each has his own reality. I draw upon my personal reality upon the dark side of myself, my unconscious.

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.

Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections

We live what we know. If we believe the universe and ourselves to be mechanical, we will live mechanically. On the other hand, if we know that we are part of an open universe, and that our minds are a matrix of reality, we will live more creatively and powerfully.

What we sincerely believe regarding ourselves is true for us.

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality

There is nothing that isn't true if you believe it; and nothing is true, believe it or not.

After all, across the population there are slight differences in brain function, and sometimes these translate directly into different ways of experiencing the world. And each individual believes his way is reality.