Collective Perception Quotes

Crowds create illusions.

We all, to some degree, absorb the mythologies around us, our vision refracted by the prisms of our particular time and place.

The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.

Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.

Art is what everyone knows it is.

Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

The difference between a vision and a hallucination is that other people can see the vision.

The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.

New York was an idea, I thought, an idea held simultaneously by thirteen million people.

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.

The popularity of disaster movies expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.

They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows, other than as an intangible, invisible mentality.

And 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. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.

I think that once somebody sees something, or feels it in the consciousness of society, it starts to allow change for other people.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded.

Cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. Their value is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them.

If everybody's not a beauty, then nobody is

If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.