George Orwell Quotes

The physical universe that you see is all in your mind. When you turn your mind off, or become unconscious, the physical universe, for you, disappears. Then, when you awaken your consciousness, the universe reappears magically. Quite simple really - no thoughts on your part, no physical world. As Walt Whitman succinctly stated: "The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual - namely to You." Without your mind to process it, the universe simply disappears into nothingness.

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

The brain builds a version of the universe and projects this version of the universe like a bubble all around us. So I can say with some certainty, 'I think therefore I am.' But I cannot say, 'You think therefore you are,' because you are within my perceptual bubble.

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

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.

Reality is mind-made.

How do I know the past is not a fiction conceived to reconcile the difference between my state of mind and the present.

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

Repudiating the sensible world, which he neither sees himself nor believes from those who have, the Peripatetic joins combat by childish quibbling in a world on paper, and denies the Sun shines because he himself is blind.

This whole world is mind's world, the product of the mind.

The world in your mind is as real as the world outside of it.

I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses....If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me. I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?

Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

We are all expressions of our own minds, projected onto the world.

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind.

When you follow your thoughts and watch them attach to certain things, it makes certain things real and other things unreal, and you realize that this is all created by your mind.

It seemed clear to me that life and the world somehow depended upon me now. I may almost say that the world now seemed created for me alone: if I shot myself the world would cease to be at least for me. I say nothing of its being likely that nothing will exist for anyone when I am gone, and that as soon as my consciousness is extinguished the whole world will vanish too and become void like a phantom , as a mere appurtenance of my consciousness, for possibly all this world and all these people are only me myself.

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.

Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored.

It is immediately apparent, however, that this sense-world, this seemingly real external universe - though it may be useful and valid in other respects - cannot be the external world, but only the Self's projected picture of it ... The evidence of the senses, then, cannot be accepted as evidence of the nature of ultimate reality; useful servants, they are dangerous guides.

You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside.

Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world.