Bertrand Russell Quotes

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

We never see a tree except through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. Look at a tree and you will find how extraordinarily difficult it is to see it completely, so that no image, no screen, comes between the seeing and the actual fact. By completely I mean with the totality of your mind and heart, not a fragment of it.

Nothing has existence unless you, I, or some living creature perceives it, and how it is perceived further influences that reality. Even time itself is not exempted from biocentrism.

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.

If you look at all the notions we accept about who we are, you find that they are all based upon our perceptual experiences.

Perception and reality are two different things.

They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?

How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.

Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call “reality”. However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions?

Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There's only one reality.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

It always seems to be raining harder than it really is when you look at the weather through the window.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . .

You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.

Knowing it and seeing it are two different things.

When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all.

It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.

Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.

Look at the sky. Ask yourselves: Has the sheep eaten the flower, yes or no? And you will see how everything changes.

This very rock where we're sitting is a rock because we have been forced to give out attention to it

Don't think you are looking at me because you are not.

Everything factual is, in a sense, theory. The blue of the sky exhibits the basic laws of chromatics. There is no sense in looking for something behind phenomena: they are theory.

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.

The recognition of the false is already the arising of the real.