John Hodgman Quotes

If we can be cheered up by positive images we can be depressed by negative ones. As long as we accept images as realities we are in that trap, because you can't control the images.

Since form is emptiness and emptiness is form, then instead of a hand grasping at nothing, it is better to grasp at someone's nose because this is closer to reality.

Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.

The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans' insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.

What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is in fact reality which forms the mystery of our existence.

Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying.

If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.

If I could simplify the whole game of power and strategy in one equation, it would all hinge on the capacity to see events around you exactly as they are. The closer your mind is to reality, the better your strategies, your responses in life.

There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

Reality, truth, and Jesus Christ are incredibly open-ended

When we consider reality itself we quickly become aware of its infinite complexity, and we realize that our habitual perception of it is often inadequate. If this were not so, the concept of deception would be meaningless.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed.

Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it.

A lot of what we're doing here deals with perception rather than truth. Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

In order to pin down reality as realilty, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the maintenance of this chain which produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.

Who’s to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos.” The skin of this world,” he said quietly.

What an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to, to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.