Paul Watzlawick Quotes

I'm particularly interested in how you can't rely on your own perception.

Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe.

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.

A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.

Most men, when they think they are thinking, are merely rearranging their prejudices.

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit, since what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

Our capacity for belief is so plastic, we can convince ourselves of anything. Believing is seeing.

Interviewers actively fool themselves, finding ways to learn from interviews even if there's actually nothing there to learn from.

When you think you're right, you're most likely wrong.

It many times falls out that we deem ourselves much deceived in others because we first deceived ourselves.

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.

How baffling it was that even the most cunning and clever people would frequently see only what they wanted to see, and would rarely look beyond the thinnest of facades. Or they would ignore reality, dismissing it as the facade. And then, when their whole world fell to pieces...they would tear their topknots or rend their clothes and bewail their karma, blaming gods or kami or luck or their lords or husbands or vassals-anything or anyone-but never themselves.

The paradigm helps a person identify the thought system, which is almost always false, that is behind the rationale for the continuation of excuses. It helps them really look at excuses from an objective point of view and realize that everything they've been thinking is just as likely to be not true as it is to be true.

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

Maybe you just saw what you wanted to see. Or maybe you justfelt what you wanted to feel.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

People who confuse what they wish were true with what is really true create distorted pictures of reality that make it impossible for them to make the best choices.

Don't waste your time with explanations: people only hear what they want to hear.

People see what they want to see when they need to.

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

You believe what you want to believe

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

We falsely interpret the world around us. We ignore evidence that doesn't support our prior beliefs and we convince ourselves we know things we don. We think we know things we don't know.