Reality Construction Quotes

It is not important whether or not the interpretation is correct-- if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

Whoever defines the word, defines the world.

Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

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.

If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

You don't get music in your daily life, do you? Even in a movie, it's unnatural to have music. I always feel it's unnatural. But I want to make it not unnatural, to construct reality in another sense.

A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible to us.

We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality.

The world is mental in some way that we do not yet understand, but that which we're edging toward understanding. And the world is made of language. I can't say that enough. Whenever we get into these discussions about reality, or effects in space and time, we are operating outside this assumption that the world is made of language.

Nothing exists except through language.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

I don't think the media is a reflection of anything. The media is an active political and pedagogical force that shapes reality. If the media were a reflection of anything, then we'd have to raise the question of why it's in the hands of basically six corporations. The media is about power.

Reality is mind-made.

Your words are containers for power, and by the words you speak you frame your world!

We think we receive all that we perceive, but in fact, we actually give the sky its colour.

How do I know the past is not a fiction conceived to reconcile the difference between my state of mind and the present.

You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.

In the end [of the "2012"], there were no ships, no water, no nothing. Only the interiors [were real]. Everything else had to be made, and that is always challenging.

The mathematics is not there till we put it there.

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

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.

You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to perceive it.

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.