Nikolai Berdyaev Quotes

Illusions... are simple facts, but they have been created by the mind, by the spirit, and they are one of the justifications of the new spatial configuration.

What seems real to the mind can be as important as any material fact. We live by the spirit and the imagination as well as by our senses. Cartoon animation can give fantasy the same reality as those things we can touch and see and hear.

Truth is always a delusion.

When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see the real you, or what you have been conditioned to believe is you? The two are so, so different. One is an infinite consciousness capable of being and creating whatever it chooses, the other is an illusion imprisoned by its own perceived and programmed limitations.

I have this sensation of being in flight all the time, but being on stage is like creating a sanctuary in which you can completely lose yourself. The bits of your personality that you keep under wraps in ordinary life, you can let them run free.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

We're not in the physical world. The physical world is in us. We create the physical world when we perceive it, when we observe it. And also we create this experience in our imagination. And when I say "we," I don't mean the physical body or the brain, but a deeper domain of consciousness which conceives, governs, constructs and actually becomes everything that we call physical reality.

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.

There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone's person.

Time is only an idea. There is only the Reality. Whatever you think it is, it looks like that.

One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.

When you leave off dreaming, the universe ceases to exist.

If you are not conscious of all of the different parts of yourself, the part of yourself that is the strongest will win out over the other parts. Its intention will be the one that the personality uses to create its reality.

You can do anything when it's not real.

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.

What magicians we are, turning darkness into light, transforming invisible atoms into dazzling theater of the world, pulling objects, (people as well as rabbits) out of secret microscopic closets, turning winter into summer, making a palmful of moments disappear through time's trap door. We learned the methods so long ago that they're unconscious, and we've hypnotized ourselves into believing that we're the audience, so I wonder where we served our apprenticeship. Under what master magicians did we learn to form reality so smoothly that we forgot to tell ourselves the secret?

Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?

The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.

My friends, I tell you repeatedly that the illusion that Life creates is very, very intelligent. The illusion itself is intelligent! Just understand how intelligent the intelligence must be in order to create an intelligent illusion. The intelligent illusion is so intelligent it will appear real to man every moment of his daily life!

Knowing that you are living in a dreamworld is very liberating, because it gives you the option of waking up.

The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

When thoughts arise, then do all things arise. When thoughts vanish, then do all things vanish.

Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.