Quote

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.

Paul Watzlawick

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Paul Watzlawick
Age: 85 †
Born: 1921
Born: July 25
Died: 2007
Died: March 31
Communication Scholar
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Ideas
Spend
Definition
Even
Instead
Definitions
Shoring
Trying
Risk
Vices
Delusions
Dangerous
Traditional
Versa
Force
Daily
Substantial
Lives
Fit
Considerable
Facts
Parts
Delusion
Reality
Everyday
Vice

More quotes by Paul Watzlawick

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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.'
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The belief that one's own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions.
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It follows from the assumption of a universally valid ideology, just as night follows day, that other positions are heresy.
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You cannot not communicate.
Paul Watzlawick
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It obviously makes a difference whether we consider ourselves as pawns in a game whose rules we call reality or as players of the game who know that the rules are ‘real’ only to the extent that we have created or accepted them, and that we can change them.
Paul Watzlawick
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Usually a person relates to another under the tacit assumption thatthe other shares his view of reality, that indeed there is only onereality.
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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.
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For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist.
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The counterpart of the suicide is the seeker but the difference between them is slight.
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Maturity… is the ability to do something even though your parents have recommended it.
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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.
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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