“People see what they wish to see. And in most cases, what they are told that they see.”

The world is a prism, not a window. Wherever we look, we find new refractions.

Anaïs Nin wrote, “We do not see the world as it is, but as we are.”

As the poet and essayist Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal in 1851, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

Deep down we know; what we see of the world is not really the way the world is but merely the way we are capable of perceiving it, the product of the limited capacities of our eyes, our ears, our minds, and our hearts. Deep down we know; however the world was one moment ago, it no longer is. It has changed.

Anaïs Nin is famously quoted as saying, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” That is, the truth is not as objective as we would like to believe. The truth is culturally mediated and socially negotiated and constructed based on our communal view of reality—our beliefs.

The world can only see us as we see ourselves.

What is it, he said to himself, that I do not see in myself, because it is of the present, as they did not see themselves? How can one look at oneself? No one sees himself.