“Depersonalization is a concept difficult to delineate. It can be regarded as a symptom or as a loosely associated group of symptoms that occurs in psychiatric patients. It can be induced experimentally and also occurs spontaneously in normal subjects. A major obstacle to clearer definition of this concept lies in the fact that it refers to exceedingly private events in the individual's experience. These prove very difficult to describe by a language geared to the description of public (consensually validated) events or private events, such as pain, that occur usually in clearly defined social settings. When it comes to describing and conveying something as ineffable as depersonalization or derealization, the subject resorts to metaphors, "as if" expressions, and figures of speech. The result is semantic confusion. Different authors mean different things when they use the term depersonalization.
The concept of depersonalization merges by imperceptible degrees with the concept derealization, the concept of altered body image and self, deja vu, jamais vu, altered time and space perception and so on - the whole gamut of phenomenological description of the experiences of mental patients. Therefore, it is rather difficult to evaluate and to review objectively the psychiatric literature on the phenomena of depersonalization.”

NeuroLogica Blog, Can Thinking Change Reality Part II http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/can-thinking-change-reality-part-ii/ (March 11, 2014)

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Human Immortality: its Positive Argument, p.309

address " What is Science? http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html", presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313-320

Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 7
Context: The genius of the Homeric style becomes even more apparent when it is compared with an equally ancient and equally epic style … God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. He does not come, like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethiopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly. He has not, like Zeus, discussed them in set speeches with other gods gathered in council; nor have the deliberations in his own heart been presented to us; unexpected and mysterious, he enters the scene from some unknown height or depth and calls: Abraham! It will at once be said that this is to be explained by the particular concept of God which the Jews held and which was wholly different from that of the Greeks. True enough—but this constitutes no objection. For how is the Jewish concept of God to be explained? Even their earlier God of the desert was not fixed in form and content, and was alone; his lack of form, his lack of local habitation, his singleness, was in the end not only maintained but developed even further in competition with the comparatively far more manifest gods of the surrounding Near Eastern world. The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things.

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 19

As quoted in Science at the Edge: Conversations with the Leading Scientific Thinkers of Today (2008), p. 170
Context: People are often unconscious of some of the mechanisms that naturally occur in them in a biased way. For example, if I do something that is beneficial to you or to others, I will use the active voice: I did this, I did that, then benefits rained down on you. But if I did something that harmed others, I unconsciously switch to a passive voice: this happened, then that happened, then unfortunately you suffered these costs. One example I always loved was a man in San Francisco who ran into a telephone pole with his car, and he described it to the police as, "the pole was approaching my car, I attempted to swerve out-of-the-way, when it struck me."
Let me give you another, the way in which group membership can entrain language-usages that are self-deceptive. You can divide people into in-groups or out-groups, or use naturally occurring in-groups and out-groups, and if someone's a member of your in-group and they do something nice, you give a general description of it – "he's a generous person". If they do something negative, you state a particular fact: "in this case he misled me", or something like that. But it's exactly the other way around for an out-group member. If an out-group member does something nice, you give a specific description of it: "she gave me directions to where I wanted to go". But if she does something negative, you say, "she's a selfish person". So these kinds of manipulations of reality are occurring largely unconsciously.

As quoted in an interview with entertainment.ie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment.ie (2018)

Peace and Sustainability: Cornerstones to survival in the 21st century http://www.visionofhumanity.org/images/content/Documents/2007%20GPI%20Final%20Discussion%20Paper.pdf (2007)

(1857/58)
Source: Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, p. 696.