Joss Whedon Quotes

The world is his who can see through its pretension.

Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.

You have to keep your mind as wide-open as your eyes, because almost nothing is what it seems.

There is not a physicist in the world who can perceive when a parlor magician palms off playing-cards.

The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

What men call knowledge, is the reasoned acceptance of false appearances. Wisdom looks behind the veil and sees.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.

The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

In real life, the most important decision you ever make is, where does reality leave off and make-believe begin? If you make a mistake about that, you're dead. You know, you're out on the street corner. You think there's no bus coming. You step out, you're dead.

Marilyn Monroe wasn't even her real name, Charles Manson isn't his real name, and now, I'm taking that to be my real name. But what's real? You can't find the truth, you just pick the lie you like the best.

Look! Don't be deceived by appearances - men and things are not what they seem. All who are not on the rock are in the sea!

It is fun to try figure out the things that really are real and the things that aren't.

Belief and seeing: They are both often wrong.

Just because it's in a movie doesn't mean it's real.

What I want people to consider is that no matter what it is we want to believe, and no matter what story it is we want to jam the world into, the truth is the truth.

Sometimes what we see, what's going on in front of us, isn't really what's happening.

I feel that one of the most important lessons that can be learned is that what we "see" may be different than what is actually in front of us.

They who imagine truth in untruth and see untruth in truth will never arrive at the truth.

He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.

The first lesson about trusting your senses is: don't. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true.

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man's task.