Dan Simmons Quotes

No one seemed able to look at themselves, coolly, from the outside. Their reality was all that could be seen in the light cast ahead by their own wishful thinking.

Everything is but what we think it.

Doesn't everyone see Reality as it is?

Perception and reality are two different things.

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.

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

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

In all aspects of life... we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor.

People who confuse what they wish were true with what is really true create distorted pictures of reality that make it impossible for them to make the best choices.

Language does our thinking for us.

When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all.

Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.

If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

When anyone says they often think something, it means they've just thought of it now.

You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

What we experience is our own concept of things. That is why no two people see quite the same world, and why, in many cases, different people see such different worlds. To put it another way, we make our own world by the way in which we think; for we really do live in a world of our own thoughts.

Truth" is contained in the preconceptions of him who seeks to define it. Any organization of ideas whatever presupposes a judgment on the world.

I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.

The world's like a ride in a fairground & when you choose to go on it you think it's real, that's how powerful our minds are

What you think is an illusion created by your glands, your emotions and, in the last analysis, by the content of your stomach. That gray matter you're so proud of is like a mirror in an amusement park which transmits to you nothing but distorted signals from reality forever beyond your grasp.

All problems are illusions of the mind.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.