Perceived Reality Quotes

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Perception is reality.

It is not important whether or not the interpretation is correct-- if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

The commonsense rules of the "real world" are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions.

We, as a culture, use television as at least one of the great arbiters of truth. Even though we know it's fiction, when we see it portrayed, we believe it. We recognize it as part of our culture.

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

The secret of showmanship consists not of what you really do, but what the mystery-loving public thinks you do.

That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities.

You don't get music in your daily life, do you? Even in a movie, it's unnatural to have music. I always feel it's unnatural. But I want to make it not unnatural, to construct reality in another sense.

Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.

Nothing is really real unless it “happens” on television…Television has brought an inversion of our consciousness. When we take our eyes off the tube, we see things that are not quite authentic – or rather, which gain authenticity only by their resemblance to how things happen on television

truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors that have become worn-out and deprived of their sensuous force, coins that have lost their imprint and are now no longer seen as coins but as metal.

Your eyes wider than distance, this life is sweeter than fiction.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

It is like we are obliged to assume that the government is only doing what it says it is doing.

The mad rarely know that they are mad. It's the rest of the world, I think, that seems insane to them.

The problem is that perception is reality.

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.

Since I wasn't able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.

Everyone has a warped vision of Hollywood and what success in Hollywood is like.

The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.

You will not ever perceive the truth that is reality. There are many realities.

There's one word that exists in every language on the face of the Earth and in every society since man began to speak. And the word is truth. And in every language it means exactly the same thing. Truth is . . . what you get other people to believe.

Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.