Ernst Mach Quotes

Your perception of the world is ... really a fabrication of your model of the world. You don't really see light or sound. You perceive it because your model says this is how the world is, and those patterns invoke the model. It's hard to believe, but it really is true.

You can't be conscious unless you have variable receptors... When people say the way I see the world is the way it is - that's ridiculous. We can only see it depending on the quality of our receptors and background.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

We don't live in the world of reality, we live in the world of how we perceive reality.

You live in the image you have of the world. Every one of us lives in a different world, with different space and different time.

Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.

The senses are the organs by which man places himself in connexion with exterior objects.

When I see a colour or hear a sound, I am aware of something, and not of nothing.

I don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality. It's only reality as we experience it.

In many instances, order is apprehended first of all by the senses.

The world you perceive is a drastically simplified model of the real world.

Through seven figures come sensations for a man; there is hearing for sounds, sight for the visible, nostril for smell, tongue for pleasant or unpleasant tastes, mouth for speech, body for touch, passages outwards and inwards for hot or cold breath. Through these come knowledge or lack of it.

We become in part what our senses take in.

The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

We cannot see what we don't believe.

We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

We each create our world by what we choose to notice, creating a world of distinction that makes sense to us. We then 'see' the world through the self we have created.

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.

We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.

Ideology is like breath: you never smell your own.

I know that I have lived because I have felt, and, feeling giving me the knowledge of my existence.