The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is. It’s that you can see the world as it isn’t.

Schulz’s line contrasts perception with imagination. Simply registering reality—“seeing the world as it is”—is not, on this view, the mind’s most remarkable feat; many organisms can track their environments. The distinctive human capacity is to represent what is absent, hypothetical, or counterfactual: to picture alternatives, anticipate futures, invent stories, and conceive of different social arrangements. That ability underwrites creativity and empathy (imagining another’s experience), but also error and self-deception (imagining what isn’t there). The quote thus celebrates the generative, world-making power of cognition while implicitly acknowledging its double edge: the same faculty that enables art, science, and moral progress can also produce illusions.