Paul Watzlawick Quotes

I don't care whether I really exist or don't, whether I'm real or fictional. What I want right now is to be the person who decides my own fate.

Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities.

The master and the student on the journey to mastery, knows that the illusions are the illusions, decides why they are there, and then consciously creates what will be experienced next within the self through the illusions. When facing any life experience, there is a formula, a process, through which you may choose to move through mastery. Simply make the following statements: One, nothing in my world is real. Two, The meaning of everything is the meaning I give it. Three, I am who I say I am, and my experience is what I say it is. This is how to work with the illusions of life.

This possibility to change reality, which exists in everyone, represents the real freedom of every human individual. He has an enormous possibility to change his world view.

If I could simplify the whole game of power and strategy in one equation, it would all hinge on the capacity to see events around you exactly as they are. The closer your mind is to reality, the better your strategies, your responses in life.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

Our consciousness is our contribution to reality. What we perceive as real, becomes real.

Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

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

Independent will is our capacity to act. It gives us the power to transcend our paradigms, to swim upstream, to rewrite our scripts, to act based on principle rather than reacting based on emotion or circumstance.

I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

I think that we need to change the culture, not blame the people that are playing the only game that exists.

It's rewarding to be able to change people's perceptions of reality, ... They just see their environment in a different way. They have a kind of different-colored glasses that they can see their world in. To me, that's really cool - when games can change you.

Enlightenment writer and philosopher Voltaire likened life to a game of cards. Players must accept the cards dealt to them. However, once they have those cards in hand, they alone choose how they will play them. They decide what risks and actions to take.

A lot of what we're doing here deals with perception rather than truth. Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.

Nobody gives you power. Real power is something you take.

Reality is fabricated out of desire.

Never, under any conditions allow circumstances to determine your reality.

There are two conflicting philosophies that I love: "Everything happens for a reason," as well as "you can change everything that you have control over."

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

The Bible puts forth a strong case for no free will and that's a real problem you know, because the justification for supposedly being punished after death is that you had free will. If you didn't have free will and you did what God predetermined, then how can he punish you?"

I'm definitely antiscientist because I feel that science represents a conspiracy to impose as the real and only universe, the universe of scientists themselves - they're reality-addicts, they've got to have things so real so they can get their hands on it.

The only power you have on this planet is the power of your decisions.