Neil Postman Quotes

I'm uncomfortable trying to rush change of perception, except to the extent that I'm going to write a book.

Change the story and you change perception; change perception and you change the world.

My greatest wish is that a certain way of looking at the world, a way I show in all of my books, gets into my readers' heads, and slowly alters their perception.

When someone tells you it’s a grain of sand, there’s a moment where your reality falls apart and you have to reconstruct it. You have to step back and ask what the image is and what it means.

You can expand your reality by developing new ways of perceiving.

What is noise to the old order is harmony to the new.

The world doesn't make sense until you force it to.

The Ripe FigNow that You live here in my chest,anywhere we sit is a mountaintop.And those other images,which have enchanted peoplelike porcelain dolls from China,which have made men and women weepfor centuries, even those have changed now.What used to be pain is a lovely benchwhere we can rest under the roses.A left hand has become a right.A dark wall, a window.A cushion in a shoe heel,the leader of the community!Now silence. What we sayis poison to someand nourishing to others.What we say is a ripe fig,but not every bird that flieseats figs.

Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality," says one of my favorite Byzantine mystics. I did this when a child; I do it now as well in the most creative moments of my life.

I'm optimistic yet disillusioned, hopeful yet frustrated.

I think inequality is in our minds. I think this is what we learn through practice... The bridge of illusion must be shattered in order for a real bridge to be constructed. One of the things we learn is that inequality is an illusion.

The most positive action we can take about the past is to change our perception of it.

A type of revolutionary novelty may be extremely beautiful in itself; but, for the creatures of habit that we are, its very novelty tends to make it illegible, at any rate to begin with.

I like when you feel like you arrive in a very different place, with a different ordering of the reality you normally think of.

Money itself isn’t lost or made. It’s simply transferred from one perception to another.

As I change my thoughts, the world around me changes.

In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.

While it may be difficult to change the world, it is always possible to change the way we look at it.

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.

I lift my arm out of the water. It's a log. Put it back under and it blows up even bigger. People see the log and call it a twig. They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop.

Often people talk about how they feel 'stuck' in a situation. You're never stuck! You may be a little frustrated, you may not have clear answers, but you're not stuck. The minute you represent the situation to yourself as being stuck, though, that's exactly how you'll feel. We must be very careful about the metaphors we allow ourselves to use.

Growth is a detox process, as our weakest, darkest places are sucked up to the surface in order to be released...often, it is not a change in partners but rather a change in perception that delivers us to the love we seek.

How does it happen that something that makes so much sense in the moonlight doesn't make any sense at all in the sunlight?

Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.