Jeanette Winterson Quotes

I don't think I could tell the whole truth about anything. That's a pretty heavy burden, because we all just view the world through this little piece of coke bottle.

Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity).

We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.

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

When did ignorance become a point of view?

Our conjectures pass upon us for truths; we will know what we do not know, and often, what we cannot know: so mortifying to our pride is the base suspicion of ignorance.

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.

The blind see what they want to see.

Truth is contrary to our nature, not so error, and this for a very simple reason: truth demands that we should recognize ourselves as limited, error flatters us that, in one way or another, we are unlimited.

It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine undertstanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits.

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

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

Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to un-know.

The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.

Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know — the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.

The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to trurh.

We see what we want to believe.

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.

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.

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are──or, as we are conditioned to see it.

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

What probably distorts everything in life is that one is convinced that one is speaking the truth because one says what one thinks.

If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers the most from its own limitations.

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