Guy Debord Quotes

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a 'real' experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information which you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you THINK or IMAGINE to be 'true.

As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.

You think you're looking at things all the time, but you're not looking at things, you're looking at what your brain is interpreting through light and color. And who knows what everybody else sees?

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.

Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?

Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.

...it is fifty percent what they see, and fifty percent what they think they see.

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a ‘real’ experience.

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.

Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what's in front of you.

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

You can't be conscious unless you have variable receptors... When people say the way I see the world is the way it is - that's ridiculous. We can only see it depending on the quality of our receptors and background.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

Visualization. It may be the most important part of your mental package.

Nothing's real unless you want it to be, and anything can be real if you want it to enough; so real doesn't really mean anything.

Everything I've seen becomes real once it becomes memory. The films I've seen are interchangeable with things that have really happened to me.

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.

The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.