Paul Watzlawick Quotes & Sayings

It follows that there are two different types of change: one that occurs within a given system which itself remains unchanged, and one whose occurrence changes the system itself. — Paul Watzlawick

You cannot not communicate. — Paul Watzlawick

Above all, in comedy, and again and again since classical times, passages can be found in which the level of representation is interrupted by references to the spectators or to the fictive nature of the play. — Paul Watzlawick

A population of four million is not quantitatively but qualitatively different from an individual, because it involves systems of interaction among the individuals. — Paul Watzlawick

Frank Farrelly ... must be thought of with respect (perhaps even delight?) by his clients who have so far played the game of therapy with their therapists, but, I am afraid, also a shocking example for those therapists who, in Laing's words, 'are playing at not playing a game'. — Paul Watzlawick

It follows from the assumption of a universally valid ideology, just as night follows day, that other positions are heresy. — Paul Watzlawick

When Paul announced himself in a rather formal way to the secretary, he said simply, "I am Watzlawick." She suspected he was a new psychiatric patient showing up for an appointment at the wrong time, and she interpreted his introduction as, "I am not Slavic. — Paul Watzlawick

A self-fulfilling prophecy is an assumption or prediction that, purely as a result of having been made, cause the expected or predicted event to occur and thus confirms its own 'accuracy.' — Paul Watzlawick

All perception and thought is relative, operating by comparison and contrast. — Paul Watzlawick

The ideological premise, however, "can" not be defective; it is sacrosanct ... Whatever does not seem right, whatever does not fit, must be explained by something wrong outside of the ideology; for its perfection is beyond all doubt. In (t)his way the ideology immunizes itself by offering more and more hair-splitting accusations. Betrayal and the dark powers of inner and outer enemies lie in wait everywhere. Theories about conspiracies develop and conveniently hide the absurdity of the premise, necessitating and justifying bloody purges. — Paul Watzlawick

This is the secret of propaganda: To totally saturate the person, whom the propaganda wants to lay hold of, with the ideas of the propaganda, without him even noticing that he is being saturated. — Paul Watzlawick

But the solution to the riddle of life and space and time lies outside space and time. For, as it should be abundantly clear by now, nothing inside a frame can state, or even ask, anything about that frame. The solution, then, is not the finding of an answer to the riddle of existence, but the realization that there is no riddle. This is the essence of the beautiful, almost Zen Buddhist closing sentences of the Tracticus: "For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist." — Paul Watzlawick

The counterpart of the suicide is the seeker; but the difference between them is slight. — Paul Watzlawick

That we do not discover reality but rather invent it is quite shocking for many people. And the shocking part about it - according to the concept of radical constructivism - is that the only thing we can ever know about the real reality (if it even exists) is what it is not. It is only with the collapse of our constructions of reality that we first discover that the world is not the way we imagine. — Paul Watzlawick

Another property of a group is that one may combine its members in varying sequence, yet the outcome of the combination remains the same. — Paul Watzlawick

How do we know what we believe we know? — Paul Watzlawick

You cannot not communicate. Every behavior is a kind of communication. Because behavior does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behavior), it is not possible not to communicate. — Paul Watzlawick

What is problematic is not absolute and somehow inherent in the nature of things, but depends on the particular case and point of view involved. — Paul Watzlawick

And as long as the outcome of any combination of two or more members is itself a member of the group. — Paul Watzlawick

In psychotherapy it is the myth of knowing this why as precondition for change which defeats its own purpose. — Paul Watzlawick

The belief that one's own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions. — Paul Watzlawick

The trouble is that everybody, myself included, has a brain in which the centers concerned with reason and logic are sitting on top of the socalled limbic system which we inherited from our reptilian ancestors and which never evolved past crude instincts and emotions. And that is why we have not yet arrived at the sate of homo sapiens. — Paul Watzlawick

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa. And the most dangerous delusion of all is that there is only one reality. — Paul Watzlawick

As I have already said, the belief that one's own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous or all delusions. It becomes still more dangerous if it is coupled with the missionary zeal to enlighten the rest of the world, whether the rest of the world wishes to be enlightened or not. To refuse to embrace wholeheartedly a particular definition of reality, to dare to see the world differently can become a "think crime" in a truly Orwellian sense as we get steadily closer to 1984. — Paul Watzlawick

The basic theme of a hostile environment that seeks to destroy the ideology has many variations. Hitler fought his life-and-death struggle against a coalition (constructed by him alone) of 'Jewish, plutocratic and Bolshevik powers supported by the Vatican'; Ulrike Meinhof's indignation was directed against 'the German parliamentary coalition, the American government, the police, the state and university authorities, the bourgeois, the Shah of Iran, the multinational corporations, the capitalist system'; the opponents of nuclear energy imagine themselves up against a powerful, monolithic alliance of irresponsible corporations, the powers of high finance, and all the institutions that are slave to it: courts, authorities, universities, as well as other research institutions, and political parties. — Paul Watzlawick

That in a universe in which everything is blue, the concept of blueness cannot be developed for lack of contrasting colors. — Paul Watzlawick

There is changeability in process, but invariance in outcome. — Paul Watzlawick

Unfortunately, natural language often makes a clear distinction between member and class difficult. — Paul Watzlawick

Thus when an interpretation of the world, an ideology, for example, claims to explain everything, one thing remains inexplicable, namely, the interpretive system itself. And with that, every claim to completeness and finality fails. — Paul Watzlawick

Radical constructivism, thus, is radical because it breaks with convention and develops a theory of knowledge in which knowledge does not reflect an 'objective' ontological reality. — Paul Watzlawick

I want to see all oppressed people throughout the world free. And the only way we can do this is by moving toward a revolutionary society where the needs and wishes of all people can be respected.' With these words the radical philosophy professor Angela Davis paraphrases Isaiah's ancient messianic dream of the lion that will peacefully lie down with the lamb in a completely good world. But what the Biblical prophet perhaps could not know is contained with a clarity that leaves nothing to be desired in the opening sentence of an address of the French Senate to Napoleon I: Sire, the desire for perfection is one of the worst maladies that can affect the human mind. — Paul Watzlawick

Maturity is doing what you think is best, even when your mother thinks it's a good idea. — Paul Watzlawick

It is difficult to imagine how any behavior in the presence of another person can avoid being a communication of one's own view of the nature of one's relationship with that person and how it can fail to influence that person. — Paul Watzlawick

If we have dwelled on Godel's work at some length, is it because we see it in the mathematical analogy of what we would call the the ultimate paradox of man's existence. Man is ultimately subject and object of his quest. While the question whether the mind can be considered to be anything like a formalized system, as defined in the preceding paragraph, is probably unanswerable, his quest for an understanding of the meaning of his existence is an attempt at formalization. — Paul Watzlawick

Man never ceases to seek knowledge about the objects of his experiences, to understand their meaning for his existence and to react to them according to his understanding. Finally, out of the sum total of the meanings that he has deduced from his contacts with numerous single objects of his environment there grows a unified view of the world into which he finds himself "thrown" (to use an existentialist term again) and this view is of the third order. — Paul Watzlawick

Maturity ... Is The Ability To Do Something Even Though Your Parents Have Recommended It. — Paul Watzlawick

Persistence and change need to be considered together, in spite of their apparently opposite nature. — Paul Watzlawick

Usually a person relates to another under the tacit assumption thatthe other shares his view of reality, that indeed there is only onereality ... — Paul Watzlawick

The suicide arrives at the conclusion that what he is seeking does not exist; the seeker concludes that what he has not yet looked in the right place. — Paul Watzlawick

Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, made a comment that sounds almost prophetic now: that the happy, primitive society (which, by the way, never existed) is lost for all those who have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, Popper warns, the more certainly we will reach the Inquisition, the secret police, and a romanticized gangsterism. But once the existential problems of the individual, who is good by nature, can be blamed on the "evil" society, nothing stands in the way of sheer imagination. The definition of the benevolent society free of all power is only a question of fantasy. — Paul Watzlawick

In other words, what is supposedly found is an invention whose inventor is unaware of his act of invention, who considers it as something that exists independently of him; the invention then becomes the basis of his world view and actions. — Paul Watzlawick

Gear-shifting is thus a phenomenon of a higher logical type than giving gas, and it would be patently nonsensical to talk about the mechanics of complex gears in the language of the thermodynamics of fuel supply. — Paul Watzlawick