Watzlawick Quotes

#1. When Paul announced himself in a rather formal way to the secretary, he said simply, "I am Watzlawick." She suspected he was a new psychiatric patient showing up for an appointment at the wrong time, and she interpreted his introduction as, "I am not Slavic.

Paul Watzlawick

#2. A population of four million is not quantitatively but qualitatively different from an individual, because it involves systems of interaction among the individuals.

Paul Watzlawick

#3. The counterpart of the suicide is the seeker; but the difference between them is slight.

Paul Watzlawick

#4. There is changeability in process, but invariance in outcome.

Paul Watzlawick

#5. 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.

Paul Watzlawick

#6. In psychotherapy it is the myth of knowing this why as precondition for change which defeats its own purpose.

Paul Watzlawick

#7. You cannot not communicate.

Paul Watzlawick

#8. 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.

Paul Watzlawick

#9. Unfortunately, natural language often makes a clear distinction between member and class difficult.

Paul Watzlawick

#10. What is problematic is not absolute and somehow inherent in the nature of things, but depends on the particular case and point of view involved.

Paul Watzlawick

#11. Gear-shifting is thus a phenomenon of a higher logical type than giving gas, and it would be patently nonsensical to talk about the mechanics of complex gears in the language of the thermodynamics of fuel supply.

Paul Watzlawick

#12. 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.

Paul Watzlawick

#13. 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.'

Paul Watzlawick

#14. Persistence and change need to be considered together, in spite of their apparently opposite nature.

Paul Watzlawick

#15. Frank Farrelly ... must be thought of with respect (perhaps even delight?) by his clients who have so far played the game of therapy with their therapists, but, I am afraid, also a shocking example for those therapists who, in Laing's words, 'are playing at not playing a game'.

Paul Watzlawick

#16. It follows that there are two different types of change: one that occurs within a given system which itself remains unchanged, and one whose occurrence changes the system itself.

Paul Watzlawick

#17. 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.

Paul Watzlawick

#18. It follows from the assumption of a universally valid ideology, just as night follows day, that other positions are heresy.

Paul Watzlawick

#19. 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.

Paul Watzlawick

#20. 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.

Paul Watzlawick

#21. That in a universe in which everything is blue, the concept of blueness cannot be developed for lack of contrasting colors.

Paul Watzlawick

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

Paul Watzlawick

#23. Another property of a group is that one may combine its members in varying sequence, yet the outcome of the combination remains the same.

Paul Watzlawick

#24. Usually a person relates to another under the tacit assumption thatthe other shares his view of reality, that indeed there is only onereality ...

Paul Watzlawick

#25. Maturity ... Is The Ability To Do Something Even Though Your Parents Have Recommended It.

Paul Watzlawick

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

Paul Watzlawick

#27. 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

#28. How do we know what we believe we know?

Paul Watzlawick

#29. Thus when an interpretation of the world, an ideology, for example, claims to explain everything, one thing remains inexplicable, namely, the interpretive system itself. And with that, every claim to completeness and finality fails.

Paul Watzlawick

#30. And as long as the outcome of any combination of two or more members is itself a member of the group.

Paul Watzlawick

#31. All perception and thought is relative, operating by comparison and contrast.

Paul Watzlawick