I lived, particularly in childhood but with lessening intensity right on to middle age, in a world that was peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them. I habitually read special meanings into things, scenes and places — qualities of wonder, beauty, promise, or horror — for which there was no external evidence visible or plausible to others. My world was peopled with mysteries, seductive hints, vague menaces, “intimations of immortality.”
The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.
Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
Madmen do not appear to me to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some of the ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths. . .For, by the violence of their imaginations, having taken their fancies for realities, they make right deductions from them.
– John Locke (1632-1704) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
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I lived, particularly in childhood but with lessening intensity right on to middle age, in a world that was peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them. I habitually read special meanings into things, scenes and places — qualities of wonder, beauty, promise, or horror — for which there was no external evidence visible or plausible to others. My world was peopled with mysteries, seductive hints, vague menaces, “intimations of immortality.”
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.
What you are afraid of is never as bad as what you imagine. The fear you let build up in your mind is worse than the situation that actually exists.
Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.
The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.
You could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!
Madmen do not appear to me to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some of the ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths. . .For, by the violence of their imaginations, having taken their fancies for realities, they make right deductions from them.
