Alfred de Vigny Quotes

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.

Our brains are like bonsai trees, growing around our private versions of reality.

What the people believe is true.

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

That reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.

The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.

Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm.

Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

I have been a strong proponent of helping people understand that during the last decade or so, as it lies at the very bottom of how we know anything. Let me give a couple examples to get that point across.

The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies "out there" in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.

Ignorance is hardly unusual, Miss Davar. The longer I live, the more I come to realize that it is the natural state of the human mind. There are many who will strive to defend its sanctity and then expect you to be impressed with their efforts.

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

The human mind may perceive truth only through thinking, as is clear from Augustine.

The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality

Your mind doesn't know the difference between reality and fantasy. Your mindacts on what you feed it. Feed it good thoughts.

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Paty, which is collective and immortal.

The human mind is a wonderful thing, it starts working from before you're born and doesn't stop till you sit down to write a song.

The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place.

I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.

Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority; natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.

Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.