Alan Greenspan Quotes

What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.

When people commit themselves to a certain vision of reality, it becomes their ultimate explainer. It serves to interpret the universe for them, to guide their moral decisions, to give meaning and purpose to life, and all the other functions normally associated with a religion.

People live their lives bound by what they accept as correct and true. That’s how they define Reality. But what does it mean to be “correct” or “true”? Merely vague concepts… Their Reality may all be a mirage. Can we consider them to simply be living in their own world, shaped by their beliefs?

What you believe to be the truth directly determines your attitude towards yourself and the world, the words you say and the actions you take.

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

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.

We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality. So the work is often a general koan into how we go about forming this world in which we live, in particular with seeing.

The world begins with what we believe.

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.

For a sorcerer, reality, or the world as we all know it, is only a description.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

Everybody's got a worldview, whether they know they have it or they don't. They might even get it when they are little tiny kids. Suppose they get it when they are in college, which is often the case, or in high school, whatever. Everything they learn after that or every thing they see after that, they fit it into that worldview. And they are making coherence of what's good, what's bad, what will work, what won't work, what's noble, what's ignoble, and so on... all through this filter.

We are taught what reality is in all kinds of ways.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

The book Forest Dark wants to provoke questions about what is reality and why are we so given to believe that reality is firm and unbendable. There's a whole host of questions that the book is asking about that. Why do we believe that the world is only one way and as we see it? Why are we not open to the ways in which it might be otherwise.

There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.

The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

‎People have presuppositions... By 'presuppositions' we mean the basic way that an individual looks at life- his worldview. The grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. A person's presuppositions provide the basis for their values- and therefore the basis for their decisions.

There's nothing wrong with the world. What's wrong is our way of looking at it.

As soon as you look at the world through an ideology, you are finished. No reality fits ideology.

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

I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process.