James Turrell Quotes

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

Perception is not always reality.

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

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

What people believe prevails over the truth.

We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.

Your mind and a computer have one thing in common: neither of them know the difference between the truth... and what you tell it.

People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true.

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

Belief and seeing: They are both often wrong.

Perception's not reality.

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.

The truth often does sound unconvincing.

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.

How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.

Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not.

The truth is a fog, in which one man sees the heavenly host and the other one sees a flying elephant.

You do not believe, you only believe that you believe.

Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth,' said his cousin. 'But we seem to have no other.

The problem with assumptions is that we believe they are the truth.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.