William James Quotes

When someone tells you it’s a grain of sand, there’s a moment where your reality falls apart and you have to reconstruct it. You have to step back and ask what the image is and what it means.

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

Thinking fragments reality - it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

The analysis of the thing is not the thing itself.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

You have an idea of the way you think it is, and it's not that way at all, it's something else.

Reality: What a concept!

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups...So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

In an ideological, polarized political environment, people see the reality that they want to see.

Men substitute words for reality and then argue about the words.

I think what happens is when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

People like what is not true and they don't like what is true.

She repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.

Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?

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.

There is always a divergence between our perception and what actually exists.

If you can imagine a thing, conjure it up in space then you can make it... The universe is real but you can't see it. You have to imagine it. Then you can be realistic about reproducing it.

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.

To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.

All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

Only fools imagine they are already awake. How clearly they understand everything! How easily they distinguish this deception from that reality!