Haruki Murakami Quotes

We open our eyes and we think we're seeing the whole world out there. But what has become clear—and really just in the last few centuries—is that when you look at the electro-magnetic spectrum we are seeing less than 1/10 Billionth of the information that's riding on there. So we call that visible light. But everything else passing through our bodies is completely invisible to us. Even though we accept the reality that's presented to us, we're really only seeing a little window of what's happening.

One of the things that got me thinking during therapy is that they say that fear is only thoughts, and nothing will happen because thoughts will never be real. And my thesis, or joke, in film Antichrist, is that they really do become real.

The artificial world that we create through images will essentially become real.

The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis.

In a world that daily disconnects further from truth, more and more people accept the virtual in place of the real, and all things virtual are also malleable.

The world's like a ride in a fairground & when you choose to go on it you think it's real, that's how powerful our minds are

In a way, everybody is wounded from the wound of the real. This phenomenon is similar to madness. The mad person is wounded by his or her distorted relationship to the real.

Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative.

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

The problem is, I can’t tell what’s real anymore, and what’s made up.

It's so easy to think that this [celebrity] is reality; that people are lining up outside just to write down what I have to say. That's not real; that's weird.

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

The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.

And this was the main precondition, that anything might be something else. Once I'd accepted that, it followed that I might be mad, or that someone might think me mad. How could I say for certain that I wasn't, if I couldn't say for certain that a curtain wasn't a mountain range?

Is it the world that says I am real, or is it you?

I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns, but not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else — what do they look to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?

Of course you're real-like any thought or any story. It's real when you're in it.

It is immediately apparent, however, that this sense-world, this seemingly real external universe - though it may be useful and valid in other respects - cannot be the external world, but only the Self's projected picture of it ... The evidence of the senses, then, cannot be accepted as evidence of the nature of ultimate reality; useful servants, they are dangerous guides.

Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that he exists." Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.

The truth is that we have to, as American citizens, stop thinking that this life that we're living, the things that we're dealing with, is some reality TV show. This is real life, real children, real situations.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

Reality is not so much what happens to us; rather, it is how we think about those events that create the reality we experience. In a very real sense, this means that we each create the reality in which we live.