Perception Is Not Reality Quotes & Sayings

What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years. — Don DeLillo

You can't tell me what we're doing right now is not working. The perception is, well, it's not. I don't deal in perception. I want to deal in reality. The reality of the matter is that the percentage of guys who are taking has gone way down. — Tom Glavine

The value of goals is not in the future they describe, but the change in perception of reality they foster. — David Allen

When we consider reality itself we quickly become aware of its infinite complexity, and we realize that our habitual perception of it is often inadequate. If this were not so, the concept of deception would be meaningless. — Dalai Lama

Reality is constructed by our perception, and it does not actually exist without it. — Russell Eric Dobda

Life is not what happens to us; it is what we perceive has happened to us. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I'll tell you what's real. Real is that I was in jail for the past year, rooming with drug dealers and eating crap food your dog wouldn't touch. Real is not being able to wear your own frickin' underwear and showering with twenty-five other dicks every day while guards watch. Real is my next-door neighbor who walks like she's balancing on stilts because her leg is so fucked up from the accident. Brian, your perception of reality is totally off. — Simone Elkeles

Nothing should be worshipped [sic] that has form or is individuated. The universal Divine Life is alone to be worshipped. There is no colorless pantheism in this concept; for the God of each man is one with the universal God: the Conqueror obtains the Universe, not by being absorbed and obliterated by it, but by transcending the limitations of his individual consciousness and partaking of the universal Divine Consciousness. As an individual he loses nothing but his imperfections, but he gains the All, the "Origin and the Perfection." And this is Seership, which is not "prophecy," "second sight" or sense-perception on any plane of consciousness, but is Direct Cognition of Reality. — James Morgan Pryse

Our perception of celebrities in Hollywood is not the reality. The reality of our lives is so much like everyone else's life. We have family members we love, everyone gets up in the morning, they have three meals a day and they go about their business. — Sissy Spacek

Man does not see reality as it is, but only as he perceives it, and his perception may be mistaken or biased. — Rudolf Dreikurs

Miracles are like stones: they are everywhere, offering up their beauty, but hardly anyone concedes value to them. We live in a reality where prodigies abound but are seen only by those who have developed their perception of them. Without this perception everything is banal, marvelous events are seen as chance, and one progresses through life without possessing the key that is gratitude. When something extraordinary happens it is seen as a natural phenomenon that we can exploit like parasites, without giving anything in return. But miracles require an exchange; I must make that which is given to me bear fruit for others. If one is not united with oneself, the wonder cannot be captured. Miracles are never performed or provoked: they are discovered. If someone who believes himself to be blind takes off his dark glasses, he will see the light. That darkness is the prison of the rational. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

To be chosen as the Beloved of God is something radically different. Instead of excluding others, it includes others. Instead of rejecting others as less valuable, it accepts others in their own uniqueness. It is not a competitive, but a compassionate choice. Our minds have great difficulty in coming to grips with such a reality. Maybe our minds will never understand it. Perhaps it is only our hearts that can accomplish this. Every time we hear about 'chosen people', 'chosen talents', or 'chosen friends', we almost automatically start thinking about elites and find ourselves not far from feelings of jealousy, anger, or resentment. Not seldom has the perception of others as being chosen led to aggression, violence, and war. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Sometimes what you see is not real, and the reality is not what you see. Somewhere between both these reasoning resides a fact: where there is a lack of trust and confidence, perception will always differ with reality. — Ashish Patel

Emotional baggage, which is carried over from the past, colors our perceptions. Likewise, past conclusions and beliefs, based on reasoning that may or may not have been accurate, also tint our perception of reality. Retaining our capacity for reason is common sense, but definite conclusions and beliefs keep us from seeing life as it really is at any given moment.
Emotional reactions can be unreasonable, and reason can be flawed. It's difficult to have deep confidence in either one, especially when they're often at war with each other. But the universal mind exists in the instant, in a moment beyond time, and it sees the universe as it literally is. It's the universe perceiving itself. It is, moreover, something we can have absolute confidence in, and with that confidence, we can maintain a genuinely positive attitude. — H.E. Davey

The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis. — Philip K. Dick

Reality is not going to change with your perception of it. — Steve Hagen

Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality ... Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense. — Gary Zukav

The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible. Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience. (Humans are not alone in this endeavor; species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to another, as people would pass a joint, after which the dolphins seem to enter a trancelike state.) — Sy Montgomery

Psycholinguists argue about whether language reflects our perception of reality or helps create them. I am in the latter camp. Take the names we give the animals we eat. The Patagonian toothfish is a prehistoric-looking creature with teeth like needles and bulging yellowish eyes that lives in deep waters off the coast of South America. It did not catch on with sophisticated foodies until an enterprising Los Angeles importer renamed it the considerably more palatable Chilean sea bass. — Hal Herzog

Perception is reality, but it may not be actuality, and you have got to be able to keep the difference between that. — Bill Cowher

You are not even seeing most of what's going on in the universe. On top of that, your brain filters out much of what it receives from the environment. So that what you are consciously aware of is only a fractional representation of your universe. — Abhijit Naskar

We apply reality from within. The world is our perception of the world. So what other people think of you, famous or not, is an independent construct taking place in their brain, and we shouldn't worry too much about it. — Russell Brand

See your life as not just your life but as eternity. Be so completely integrated in the experience of perception that there's no sense of a perceiver but just the fluid moment of ecstasy that is reality unfolding itself to itself. — Frederick Lenz

An odd thing about perception is that when we identify some new thing with one or more of our five senses, it is not really, immutably real
it is a passing will o' the wisp, an artifact of the senses and the translations of the brain until we get used to it and we give it a home in our hearts — Nigel Hey

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans ... If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness. — Philip K. Dick

For Bohr the theory came first, then the philosophical position, the interpretation constructed to make sense of what the theory says about reality. Einstein knew that it was dangerous to build a philosophical worldview on the foundation of any scientific theory. If the theory is found wanting in the light of new experimental evidence, then the philosophical position it supports collapses with it. 'it is basic for physics that one assumes a real world existing independently from any act of perception', said Einstein. 'But this we do not know'. — Manjit Kumar

Not to understand is profound; to understand is shallow. Not to understand is to be on the inside; to understand is to be on the outside. — Zhuangzi

Fear is a perception, not a reality, and derives from the unknown. — Debasish Mridha

The way to embody love completely is to see and appreciate life just as it is, and not as you believe, fear, or desire it to be. — Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Most of us go through each day looking for what we saw yesterday And, not surprisingly, that is what we find. — James A. Kitchens

Thoughts are a powerful thing, but most of us wield them haphazardly. By the time we are young adults our minds and personalities are shaped to a great degree. Our thinking becomes habit and routine, like a river, and our thoughts must follow wherever the ravine takes us. As our negative thinking takes over our mind like strangling vines, the years continue to pass and we lose our goals and dreams. We form perceptions of reality and assume that everyone else thinks and sees the world as we do. They do not. An interesting fact is that your perception of reality is almost always wrong. The good and bad news is that our lives are most affected by the way we think things are, not the way they actually are. Be careful what you think about, it absolutely will shape your life. — Adam Shepherd

An individual's perception is their reality colored in the shades they desire
not necessarily the color that it is. — Terry A. O'Neal

The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure. [ ... ] There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the 'normal', the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally. — Harlan Ellison

Do the structures of language and the structures of reality (by which I mean what actually happens) move along parallel lines? Does reality essentially remain outside language, separate, obdurate, alien, not susceptible to description? Is an accurate and vital correspondence between what is and our perception of it impossible? Or is it that we are obliged to use language only in order to obscure and distort reality
to distort what happens
because we fear it? — Harold Pinter

The mind is just a delusion not a reality. If the materials are perception of our mind, then why we cannot turn into handsome guys and beautiful ladies without putting a hundred grams of makeup powder? — M.F. Moonzajer

According to this model, human beings are, at least in one aspect, sensation-receiving machines; and although our receptory apparatus is competent to select and organize outward stimuli within the narrow range necessary for physical survival within our environment, it does not necessarily tell us very much about the nature of that environment. People, in other words, have little access to the possible world existing beyond their sensations. — Cruce Stark

There are things you can do with this knowledge, like always save room for dessert. Seriously, imagine planning a vacation with the peak-end rule in mind. Your overall pleasure will be enhanced if you end it on a high note. It's certainly something for me to keep in mind in planning my workshops. Maybe people will believe the whole presentation was terrific if I end with something especially compelling. You should also keep in mind that here is a way your brain consistently distorts your perception of your own happiness and misery. Politicians use this principle all the time - that's why they propose their most audacious policies just after they're elected, assuming that we'll be lulled into not caring, as we adapt to their new reality. Remember GWB's attempt at social security reform? — Anonymous

If you perceive a world where there are separate images and you still feel a charge about anything, that is the indicator that you want to ask for Help. Lord, help me today. I am determined to see. Help me to see. That is where the openness and the humility come in. If you feel a charge about something, you not only are not seeing clearly, you are not seeing at all. — David Hoffmeister

Reality is only as true as it is perceived. Reality does not change. How it is perceived does. — Murad S. Shah

Our perception of reality is malleable. Everything is always shifting. We may not have the power to change an event, but we do have the power to change our perspective. — Stephanee Killen

The shortest interval between two points is the awareness that they are not two. — Eric Micha'el Leventhal

It's madness to see life as it is and not how it should be. — Knight Of The Woeful Countenance

Learn to look without imagination, to listen without distortion: that is all. Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realize that every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelled, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience peace and freedom from fear. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

In our humble12 opinion, the South in general's attitude regarding the war and everything that came after needs a major paradigm shift. Put simply: we need to be more like Germany. Ya see, after World War II, Germany as a nation took responsibility for its crimes, owned up to them, and has refused to make excuses for the atrocities that occurred. Germans own it. That's just the way it is. (Or at least the perception of the way it is, and as we keep reiterating, the perception can be just as important as the reality.) How many people in the South could stomach the idea of Nazi statues existing in Germany in order to "honor the past" but "not meant to offend the Jews, of course?" Because y'all do realize that's what most of these Civil War monuments are, right? — Trae Crowder

Every culture that's ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be delivered in the next 18 months, and from Egypt forward they've been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things and yet we look back at every society that preceded us with great smugness at how naive they all were. Well, it never occurs to us, then, that maybe we're whistling in the dark too! That the universe is stranger than you CAN suppose, and that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing, because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor but in service to the living mystery: the fact that you're not going to understand it; it is not going to yield to logic; or magic; or any other technique that's been developed ... — Terence McKenna

The private experience that you perceive forms your world, period. But which world do you inhabit? For if you altered your private sensations of reality, then that world, seemingly the only one, would also change. You do go through transformations of beliefs all the time, and your perception of the world is different. You seem to be, no longer, the person you that you were. You are quite correct - you are not the person that you were, and your world has changed, and not just symbolically. — Jane Roberts

My identity as Abba's child is not an abstraction or a tap dance into religiosity. It is the core truth of my existence. Living in the wisdom of accepted tenderness profoundly affects my perception of reality, the way I respond to people and their life situations. How I treat my brothers and sisters from day to day, whether they be Caucasian, African, Asian, or Hispanic; how I react to the sin-scarred wino on the street; how I respond to interruptions from people I dislike; how I deal with ordinary people in their ordinary unbelief on an ordinary day will speak the truth of who I am more poignantly than the pro-life sticker on the bumper of my car. We are not for life simply because we are warding off death. We are sons and daughters of the Most High and maturing in tenderness to the extent that we are for others - all others - to the extent that no human flesh is strange to us, to the extent that we can touch the hand of another in love, to the extent that for us there are no others. — Brennan Manning

Purpose in the suffering

A crisis-- the kind that knocks the wind out of ya, the kind that makes your blood run cold and alters your perception of all you think your reality "is," THAT kind of crisis brings us not only to our knees, but smack-dab with every question we've ever pondered on God's existence. There is purpose in the suffering. It MAKES us ask eternal questions with eternal answers. Often that's what it takes to wake us up. The suffering is actually merciful, from a God who would literally do ANYTHING to get us to run into His arms. — Carrie Lynn Jones

Reality, it seems, is not a flat plane, but has as many veils as an onion has skins. — Johnny Rich

Internal mental experience is not the product of a photographic process. Internal reality is in fact constructed by the brain as it interacts with the environment in the present, in the context of its past experiences and expectancies of the future. At the level of perceptual categorizations, we have reached a land of mental representations quite distant from the layers of the world just inches away from their place inside the skull. This is the reason why each of us experiences a unique way of minding the world. (pp. 166-167) — Daniel J. Siegel

The industrialisation of England had quickened during Hardy's life and in the novel he places great importance on rural culture and the need of man to interact with, and understand the natural world, however indifferent it may be to human survival. The author does not sketch a portrait of an idyllic rural scene, but highlights and details the devastating consequences and brute force of the natural world. Hardy uses these disasters to underline the prominence of chance or luck in life, rather than benevolent design by a creator and how this might impact moral decisions. Impressionist art also influences Hardy's perception of reality and what knowledge each individual is capable of attaining in any situation. — Thomas Hardy

The concern of your brain is not to see the actual nature of reality, but to represent the reality to you in such a way that suits your needs. — Abhijit Naskar

Truth and reality are two different things. Truth is nothing more or less than an expression of reality as you perceive it, while reality being something totally independent of, and indifferent to how you express, or even, perceive it. People differ only in their reference to reality; and this difference is not without its own implications. Certain interpretations have more value in certain situations, and vice versa. Any number of opposite propositions may be true simultaneously, but their truth value will ultimately decide their worth. From which angle to look at reality at a certain time, is a wisdom philosophy is not designed to endow. It can only help you refine your perception. In order to choose and change your mode of perception, you perhaps need Will. — Raheel Farooq

The person in the saddle is not necessarily the one holding the reins. — D. Cypriani Regis

WHEN the candles are lit on the Christmas Tree, the human soul feels as though the symbol of an eternal reality were standing there, and that this must always have been the symbol of the Christmas Festival, even in a far distant past. For in the autumn, when outer Nature fades, when the sun's creations fall as it were into slumber and man's organs of outer perception must turn away from the phenomena of the physical world, the soul has the opportunity - nay not only the opportunity but the urge - to withdraw into its innermost depths, in order to feel and to experience: Now, when the light of the outer sun is faintest and its warmth feeblest, now is the time when the soul withdraws into the darkness but can find within itself the inner, spiritual Light. — Anonymous

There is no single thing ... that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says 'I am more than just my appearance'. If each object quivers with readiness to imply something other than itself, if each perception is a word in a poem dense with connotations, then the poet's selection of any given subject of speculation will become ... a means of attuning himself to the rhythms and harmonies of reality at large ... The notion of a network of correspondence is not an outmoded Romantic illusion: it represents a crucial intuition ... — Roger Cardinal

Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Would we be able to detect music without the ear? Of course not. Well, we are surrounded by things whose existence we never suspect, because we lack the organs that would reveal them to us. [Was He Mad?] — Guy De Maupassant

Perception is real even when it is not reality. — Edward De Bono

By observing natural scientific discoveries through a perception deepened by meditation, we can develop a new awareness of reality. This awareness could become the bedrock of a spirituality that is not based on the dogmas of a given religion, but on insights into a higher and deeper meaning. I am referring to the ability to recognize, to read, and to understand the firsthand revelations. — Albert Hofmann

We must remember that we do not observe nature as it actually exists, but nature exposed to our methods of perception. The theories determine what we can or cannot observe ... Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one. — Albert Einstein

Perception is like painting a scenery - no matter how beautifully you paint, it will still be a painting of the scenery, not the scenery itself. — Abhijit Naskar

in simple terms, what you perceive as real, is actually a neurological reconstruction or simulation of the actual real thing. It's not as simple as saying, we see as it is. Actually we do not ever see as it is. — Abhijit Naskar

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains. — James Baldwin

Universe is not a calm lake and therefore when you watch a calm lake you get a deceptive idea about the universe and you get a wrong perception of future! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That's been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable. — Michael Haneke

It is true that our everyday view of the world is not quite naively realistic, but that is what it would like to be. Common-sense is naively realistic wherever it does not think that there is some positive reason why it should cease to be so. And this is so in the vast majority of its perceptions. When we see a tree we think that it is really green and really waving about in precisely the same way as it appears to be. We do not think of our object of perception being 'like' the real tree, we think that what we perceive is the tree, and that it is just the same at a given moment whether it be perceived or not, except that what we perceive may be only a part of the real tree. — Charlie Dunbar Broad

Imagine, Bishop, that you have a beloved cat, but that your cat is not with you. If you close your eyes and further imagine you are petting your cat, the same neurons in your brains are activated as if you were petting the actual cat. Our minds may know the difference between its models and reality itself, but it prefers its models. So much so that we apprehend reality through our models, rather than directly via the sense. When I'm speaking to you, I have a little bishop in my head, and though I speak out load, I'm speaking to my little bishop. When you answer, I can only perceive you through my model of you.
Mentars also make models, but they don't apprehend reality through them. They end up, not with little people in their minds, but with highly complex rule sets. They relate to their models in the same way we relate to weather models, as things to consult, but not to conflate with external reality. — David Marusek

I am aware that when we see something, we are getting only a measure of information, a sense, an inkling of what is really there to see. I don't know the details or the terminology but I do know that the optic nerve is not telling the full truth. We're seeing only intimations. The rest is our invention, our way of constructing what is actual, if there is any such thing, philosophically, that we can call actual. — Don DeLillo

Self discovery doesn't not seek to bring you answers about your personal life or philosophically comfort you about life and death. What it does is bring you into reality as perception itself. — Frederick Lenz

Truly to realize the ambitions of a science of mind does not solely involve learning about such issues as how we know, perceive and solve problems; it involves finding out tow hat extent the world outside us is knowable by us, and indeed prescribing the limits of inquiry for disciplines like Physics which claim to afford knowledge of the external physical world. — Sean O Nuallain

The problem was acutely described in 1909 in a penetrating essay by Adolf Schlatter: According to the sceptical position, it is true that the historian explains; he observes the New Testament neutrally. But in reality this is to begin at once with a determined struggle against it. The word with which the New Testament confronts us intends to be believed, and so rules out once and for all any sort of neutral treatment. As soon as the historian sets aside or brackets the question of faith, he is making his concern with the New Testament and his presentation of it into a radical and total polemic against it.... If he claims to be an observer, concerned solely with his object, then he is concealing what is really happening. As a matter of fact, he is always in possession of certain convictions, and these determine him not simply in the sense that his judgments derive from them, but also in that his perception and observation is molded by them.352 — Ellen F. Davis

The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence - as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality. — Roland Barthes

My job is not to worry about what everyone else thinks about me but to discover what I think. If I actually want to know what someone else thinks, my job is then to ask that person. More often than not, however, it isn't important to know. It's okay if people are mad at me, and it's okay if people think I'm a complete idiot - as long as I'm doing my best. Just because certain people might have judgments about me, it does not mean they have authority over me. To truly form my own life, I had to ask questions like 'What are my needs? And 'What are my thoughts?' I had to acknowledge both my strengths and my weaknesses. I had to form my own opinions based on my reality instead of someone else's. — Jenni Schaefer

In some cases the mental perception you see is significantly different than the reality you do not see. — Bill Harvey

Your ideas need not have anything to do with reality. Making conclusions is a sure way of not enhancing our perception. — Jaggi Vasudev

Am I a fruitcake? I don't know. Perception is reality, so if I sit here and say, "I'm not a fruitcake, I'm a lemon cake," it doesn't matter. What you see me as in your world is what I am; it doesn't matter what I am - do you know what I mean? To me, I know what my real problems are - and they're certainly not about cake. And that's just the way it is. — Macy Gray

Travelers perceptions do not always reflect the reality of a situation, and ignorance is costing the industry billions. — Paul Dowling

Truth is individual."
"What? No it's not. Truth is ... it's Truth. Reality."
"Your truth is what you see," Pattern said, sounding confused. "What else could it be? That is the truth that you spoke to me, the truth that brings power. — Brandon Sanderson

We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in. The man who believes that the resources of the world are infinite, for example, or that if something is good for you then the more of it the better, will not be able to see his errors, because he will not look for evidence of them. For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception - his epistemological premises - he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be. Sometimes the dissonance between reality and false beliefs reaches a point when it becomes impossible to avoid the awareness that the world no longer makes sense. Only then is it possible for the mind to consider radically different ideas and perceptions. — Gregory Bateson

Nobody is expecting us to do anything. We can't let that perception become our reality, because with the ability on this team, if everybody can pick it up a notch, we'll be fine. It's not going to be Brooks coming in saving the day, or myself. It's got to be everybody as a unit playing consistent. If it happens, it's going to be great. It will be something like I've never experienced. — Vinny Testaverde

Perceptions are not reality. How you perceive your life, your value, and your destiny doesn't give you the whole picture. You may be seeing yourself and your significance dimly. But your self-perception determines in large measure the way your life will go ... It is vital that those deep questions at the core of your being are answered with truth. Dim or mistaken perceptions that aren't in keeping with reality must be challenged and corrected by the light of God's Word. — Chip Ingram

The dream you are living is your creation. It is your perception of reality that you can change at any time.
You have the power to create hell, and you have the power to create heaven.
Why not dream a different dream? Why not use your mind, your imagination, and your emotions to dream heaven? — Miguel Angel Ruiz

Perception is more important than reality. If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is in fact true. This doesn't mean you should be duplicitous or deceitful, but don't go out of your way to correct a false assumption if it plays to your advantage. — Ivanka Trump

I've come to realize that the biggest problem anywhere in the world is that people's perceptions of reality are compulsively filtered through the screening mesh of what they want, and do not want, to be true. — Travis Walton

Whatever the reality is the perception is that Marco Rubio went to Washington and threw in with the, quote/unquote, "establishment". He cannot - he cannot recover from that. Has not been able to recover from that. — Rush Limbaugh

My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there. — J. M. W. Turner

Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows in perception if not in reality. The best response to terror is righteous anger, confidence in ultimate justice, a refusal to be intimidated. — Dean Koontz

My holy brother, I would enter into all your relationships, and step between you and your fantasies. Let my relationship to you be real to you, and let me bring reality to your perception of your brothers. They were not created to enable you to hurt yourself through them. They were created to create with you. This is the truth that I would interpose between you and your goal of madness. Be not separate from me, and let not the holy purpose of Atonement be lost to you in dreams of vengeance. Relationships in which such dreams are cherished have excluded me. Let me enter in the Name of God and bring you peace, that you may offer peace to me. — Foundation For Inner Peace

But love is a fluid thing. It's not the same for every person. The concept is. The reality isn't. When you hear people talking, they're usually trying to validate their own perception of what love is, or what it means to be in love. — Brandon Shire

I am not against the pharmaceutical companies. I love them. That's not the issue. The issue is, in some cases, when they do these clinical trials, they control the data. They analyze the data. In some cases, they even write the article. And that leads to at least the perception, if not the reality, that there's a conflict of interest. — Catherine D. DeAngelis

What is important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again. Really great art regenerates the perception of reality; the reality becomes richer, better or not, just different. — Gabriel Orozco

Perception is reality.. Perhaps.. But reality is not always the "truth". — Mohamed Ibrahim

I think 'Pretty Polly' is an attempt to speak to these same nature spirits. It is a ritual of bloodletting, an appeal to invisible forces, a cry to the goddess to come embrace us with her thorny arms. Polly's murder works as Joseph Campbell believed all myth worked - as a secret opening, a knife slashed in the veil of experience through which deep knowledge may seep. To those not gifted enough to hear the bean plants talk or to see the fairies dancing, myth may be our only access to places outside our conscious perception of reality. — Rennie Sparks

Well, I think I'm not a non-believer, and I'm not a believer. But, on the other hand, I couldn't give you a good enough reason why EVP doesn't exist. I don't know enough about it, so how could I say it's not true. Plus, a person's reality is a person's reality so that's your belief system. It's all perception anyway, isn't it. — Michael Keaton

We see what we want to see, what we expect to see, instead of what's really there. I don't think we do it on purpose, most of the time. We just get kind of stuck. We start thinking that the way things are is the way they'll always be. But that's not true. It can't be true. Because the world is never still. — Lauren Miller

For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy. — Richard K. Morgan

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. — Peter Watts

Contrary to what many may think, immortality is not a fairy tale invented to compensate for an unhappy life. Rather, it is the perception shared by nearly all sentient beings that our conscious lives are not bounded by this time and space. We are not merely lumps of animate matter. We are living spirits - we all feel this innately. And in our deepest hearts, we know that we can only find ultimate fulfilment in union with the supreme spiritual reality - a reality that appears, even during this earthly life, to take us beyond the narrow limits of time. — Stephen R. Lawhead

exists independent of its appearances. Our perception of time also rests on a mistaken apprehension of reality. What in fact is the past? The past is not a reality; it's just a concept. The future corresponds to projections, anticipations that do not have any reality either. The past has already occurred; the future does not yet exist. These notions affect us as realities, although they have no substance. The present is the truth that we are experiencing here and now, but it is an elusive reality that does not last. We find ourselves in a paradoxical situation in which the present constitutes a border, a limit between a past and a future without any concrete reality. The present is that elusive moment between what no longer exists and what has not yet happened. — Dalai Lama XIV

Concerning [postmodern] ideas, let us not mince words. The ideas are profoundly dangerous. They subvert our civilization by denying that truth is found by conscientious attempts accurately to portray a reality that exists independently of our perception or attitudes or other attributes such as race, ethnicity, sex or class. — George Will