Who wrote "We see things not as they are, we see them as WE are."?

Would be easy to just find when they said it then compare the dates.

@Carol This is one of those quotes that has no sourced author and so gets attributed to all sorts of people. Any citation you see is suspect.

@Hibernate That doesn’t really work since (1) modern quotes are often incorrectly attributed to people from the past, and (2) quote citations rarely come with dates attached in the first place.

I’ve seen it worded like this:

We see things not as they are but as we are.

It might have been uttered by some Zen teacher or some new-age prophet. If you want to quote it, I think you’d be pretty safe with a vague reference: “It’s been said that…” or “A wise person once said…”

@CunningLinguist some yes. But if you look for the quote and you see it was used by someone a century ago you’ll know for sure he’s more suitable to be the first who used it.

The googling is meant to find out how old is the quote by seeing who used it first. It might not come with a date but you can approximate who used it first. Someone borned in ‘03 could have said it before someone from ‘28. It’s less likely that someone at the age of 12 [for the sake of argument] could say it when the other is 37. I’m sure you understand.

You could attribute the quote to Luigi Pirandello who said, “It is if you think so.”

Otherwise, I have seen that same quote @Carol as, “We see and understand things not as they are but as we are”

I think it gets reworded by various philosophical discussions.

@Hibernate I actually looked up their birth and death dates and the time of their writings. She was born and died first, but not by very much. One could certainly call them contemporaries.
@Jeruba Thanks for your wording. Its much better than what I had.
@SpatzieLover Thanks for the Pirandello quote. Most helpful everyone. Delight is my middle name.

@Hibernate You are completely missing the point. Your method assumes that we already know the attributions are genuine. We don’t. That’s part of the problem.

@Carol yeah but she Anais was born ‘03 while Morrie in ‘28. It more convenient to believe the older one said it because has more experience.
@CunningLinguist then by what you say we might never know who said it because we cannot verify it. So anyone can have this quote attributed to them.

@Hibernate Exactly: in the absence of an authoritative source, we might never know who said it first. But that doesn’t mean we can attribute it to anyone. In fact, the safer route would be to attribute it to no one.

All good then. I did not attribute it so I’m good here.