Herbert A. Simon Quotes

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

Perception is reality.

We don't live in the world of reality, we live in the world of how we perceive reality.

What we think about Paris is a part of how we feel about it. Our idea of Paris is our idea and we don't know that that's not necessarily the way it really is. It feels so real.

There are only two types of people in the world. There are the people who understand that this is a matrix, and then there are the people who buy it lock, stock and barrel.

Your perception of the world is ... really a fabrication of your model of the world. You don't really see light or sound. You perceive it because your model says this is how the world is, and those patterns invoke the model. It's hard to believe, but it really is true.

The dream of life is really an illusion, and everybody lives in the reality he or she creates - a virtual reality that is only true for the one who creates it.

Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.

What is reality, anyway? Just a collective hunch.

Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple.

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

You live in the image you have of the world. Every one of us lives in a different world, with different space and different time.

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

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.

Reality doesn't bite, rather our perception of reality bites.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.

I'm less interested in reality. I'm more interested in perception, the truth of the universe that we see.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven

Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.