Elfriede Jelinek Quotes

Reality: What a concept!

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

Our brains are like bonsai trees, growing around our private versions of reality.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.

We know nothing accurately in reality, but [only] as it changes according to the bodily condition, and the constitution of those things that flow upon [the body] and impinge upon it.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

Our relationship to reality and to our experience is all based upon the ideas in our mind that we're always trying to live up to.

No Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute Knowledge of Fact.

The world you perceive is a drastically simplified model of the real world.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the universe is the merest illusion.

I think what happens is when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is.

People say they make movies to show what 'really happens.' But they only show what they choose to show.

There are only two types of people in the world. There are the people who understand that this is a matrix, and then there are the people who buy it lock, stock and barrel.

What one reads in the newspaper and what one sees on the street are absolutely not the same.

Reason is the illusion of reality

Reality is something the human race doesn't handle very well.

Reality is mind-made.

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.

What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...

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

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.

We are taught what reality is in all kinds of ways.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.