Norton Juster Quotes

How can you see something that isn't there?" yawned the Humbug, who wasn't fully awake yet. "Sometimes, it's much simpler than seeing things that are,"he said. "For instance, if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones." "Then where is Reality?" barked Tock. "Right here,"cried Alec, waving his arms.

Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.

Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.

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

The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't.

Reality doesn't bite, rather our perception of reality bites.

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

There's so many different types of illusions; our lives are an illusion in a sense.

How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.

The imaginary is what tends to become real.

Perception was easily accomplished, required little effort, and it never had to stand the test of reality.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

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

To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.

Imagination comes from yourself and can deceive you, but vision is a gift from outside yourself - like light striking on your closed eyelids and lifting them to see what's really there.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.

There are two kinds of world: the one we dream about and the real one.