Everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality.
In reality, our mind is the creator of all the things we experience.
Things do not have meaning. We assign meaning to everything.
Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.
Reality is mind-made.
Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.
Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.
The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
Most writing doesn’t take place on the page; it takes place in your head.
The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man.
Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.
It was the building from the drawing in my brain. And if you don’t think that’s a weird sentence, maybe you should reread it.
Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of things; and whilst some languages, given a man's constitution and habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is intelligible or right.
We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.
Moment by moment throughout our lifetime, our brains hum with the work of making meaning: weaving together many thousands of threads of information into all manner of thoughts, feelings, memories, and ideas.
The task of understanding is not to replicate in conceptual form something that already exists, but rather to create a wholly new realm, that together with the world given to our senses constitutes the fullness of reality.
To know the world, one must construct it
The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.
It's pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don't actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what's going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings.
What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we write a sentence, we create a world, which is not the world, but the world as is appears within a dimension of assessment.
The essential functions of the mind consist in understanding and in inventing, in other words, in building up structures by structuring reality.
The human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things.
Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.
What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate - and immediately forget we have done so.
The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience.
