Willing Suspension Of Disbelief Quotes

Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Top Gun,” I whispered to Lindsey. We’d started pointing out Luc’s ubiquitous pop culture references, having decided that because he cut his fangs in the Wild West, he’d been entranced by movies and television. You know, because living in a society of magically enhanced vampires didn’t require enough willing suspension of disbelief. -Merit in Chloe Neill’s Friday Night Bites

that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith

A wish is many things. It is hope and desire and daydreams. It is impossibility and improbability and something in between. It is stardust and well water and spectrums of light in the sky. It is half-melted birthday candles and Christmas lists. It is broken turkey bones, It is the willing suspension of disbelief. And sometimes it is desperation. It is a hole in your heart that wants filling. It is more-than-anything-in-the-world.

...the grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief.

We may exhort ourselves to read tolerantly, we may quote Coleridge on the willing suspension of disbelief until we think ourselves totally suspended in a relativistic universe, and still we will find many books which postulate readers we refuse to become, books that depend on 'beliefs' or 'attitudes'...which we cannot adopt even hypothetically as our own.

Charlie Munger gave me a great quotation on this subject, from Demosthenes: “Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.” The belief that some fundamental limiter is no longer valid—and thus historic notions of fair value no longer matter—is invariably at the core of every bubble and consequent crash. In fiction, willing suspension of disbelief adds to our enjoyment.

Virtual reality is the willing suspension of disbelief,

Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief'. But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.

This was the Evangelical Revival that now began to take hold on the propertied class, who, frightened by what was happening in France, were anxiously mending their fences, spiritual as well as political. To escape rationalism’s horrid daughter, revolution, they were only too willing to be enfolded in the anti-intellectual embrace of Evangelicalism, even if it demanded faith and good works and a willing suspension of disbelief.

The ability to question alongside someone else is a form of “intellectual empathy.” When we have it, we imaginatively enter into how another person is looking at the world. We go beyond the willing suspension of disbelief to momentarily granting premises and commitments that we might otherwise reject to see how their framework holds together—if the whole framework holds together—and to discern how to respond in light of that. Intellectual empathy is a form of seeing how. As in, “Oh, I see how you could think that. It’s wrong, but I can see how it might make sense.” Or as in, “Oh, I see how you’re thinking there. That’s wrong for the following seventeen reasons!” Or, “Yes, that does make sense. That’s a good point.” It is an act that is aimed first toward the good of understanding, a good that persuasion may flow from but can never precede.

Man, Sub-creator’ was in one sense a new way of expressing what is often called ‘the willing suspension of disbelief, and Tolkien made it the central argument of the lecture. ‘What really happens,’ he wrote, ‘is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator”. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.

I’ve started writing a treatise on the role of “willing suspension of disbelief” in fiction and drama. Its working title is The Technobabble Sufficiency.

Mandelbrot moved beyond dimensions 0,1,2,3…to a seeming impossibility: fractional dimensions. The notion is a conceptual high-wire act. For nonmathematicians it requires a willing suspension of disbelief. Yet it proves extraordinarily powerful.

Starting in the 1900s, from coast to coast and seven days a week, Americans more than anyone on Earth could immerse in the virtuosic fantasies created and sold by show business and the media. This was a new condition. As we spent more and more fabulous hours engaged in the knowing and willing suspension of disbelief, experiencing the unreal as real, we became more habituated to suspending disbelief unconsciously and involuntarily as well.