David Eagleman Quotes

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.

In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch. Reality to us is thinghood , consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact.

Everything I can't see / is at least as real as what I can.

Everything we see… is just the visible part of reality.

The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.

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.

Poetry increases the feeling for reality.

You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility.

In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?

All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away.

All descriptions of matter are descriptions of modes of human perception within consciousness.

We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of these assumptions.

Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.

To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is. A pessimistic attitude can never create the calm and serene smile which blossoms on the lips of Bodhisattvas and all those who obtain the way.

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.

The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.

Mans desires are limited by his perceptions; none can desire what he has not perceived.

Everyone has been a witness sometime - It doesn't change it if you don't believe.

...dreams were dreams and reality was reality and she felt people were better off understanding the difference.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.

The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?

We live in condensations of our imagination

You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

There is no one truth. There’s only what happened, based on how you perceive it.