46 Quotes by 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.'

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.