J. William Fulbright Quotes

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

Perception's not reality.

The problem is that perception is reality.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

People say I have a distorted lens. I think I see things as they really are.

You have an idea of the way you think it is, and it's not that way at all, it's something else.

I understand the difference between perception and reality.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

There is always a divergence between our perception and what actually exists.

The thing is too that when you sell people a false reality and they take that to be the norm, when that false reality is light-years from what’s really happening, that in itself is a tremendous defense mechanism because when you start talking about what is actually happening, it is so different from what people perceive to be happening. They just can’t make that jump; it’s too insane for them.

Our beliefs are, however, often contrary to fact.

It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

There's a very fine line between one person's reality and another person's fantasy.

Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.

So, we, as human beings, live in a very imprecise world. A world where our perceptions of reality are far more important than actual reality.

Perception is created and twisted so quickly.

We too, through lack of knowledge and of sufficiently mature reflection, mistook the visible outward appearance of the phenomenon for the phenomenon itself.

Distinctions drawn by the mind are not necessarily equivalent to distinctions in reality.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.

You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.

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

Belief and seeing: They are both often wrong.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

Perception is not always reality.