Maxwell Maltz Quotes

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

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

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.

Thought makes reality.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

Mental pictures offer us an opportunity to practice new traits and attitudes, which otherwise we could not do. This is possible because again - your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and one that is vividly imagined.

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

Some may be helped by images, some may not. Some require an image outside, others one inside the brain.

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.

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.

Illusion starts between the ears. If the person doing illusion doesn't believe it, then the audience doesn't believe it. Seeing the picture in your head will allow the audience to see it in their heads.

We animate what we can see, and we see only what we animate.

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.

I've seen things, and that's almost the same as doing them.

The picture is in your head, in your imagination, everything.

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.

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.

Our minds can shape the way a thing will be because we act according to our expectations.

Thought is cause: experience is effect. If you don't like the effects in your life, you have to change the nature of your thinking.

The more we see the more we must be able to imagine, and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.

Perception is a selective act of attention and interpretation.

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.