Quotes About Reality

There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that.

you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature.

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.

I have always wondered what relationship this present reality bears to an ultimate reality.

Time that had not come yet—an anomaly in itself—had the fiercest reality for her. It was a hard wind in her face; if she had made the world, every tree would be bent, every stone weathered, every bough stripped by that steady and contrary wind. Lucille saw in everything its potential for invidious change.

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence? It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.

Time that had not come yet — an anomaly in itself — had the fiercest reality for her.

We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.

If appearance is only a trick of the nerves, and apparition is only a lesser trick of the nerves, a less perfect illusion, then this expectation, this sense of a presence unperceived, was not particularly illusory as things in this world go.

If you thought dead was just dead, then you wouldn't have to worry about any of this.

There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.

It was absurd to think that things were held in place, are held in place, by a web of words.

At the very best there are two major problems with ideology. The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality. It is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe. And the second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault here lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary.

Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don't add up. They don't even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we realize that experience does not accumulate like money, or memories, or like years and frailties.

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality.

We are part of this ultimate reality and by nature we participate in eternal things--justice, truth, compassion, love. We have a vision of these things we have not arrived at by reason, have rarely learned from experience, and have not found in history. We feel the lack. Hope leads us toward them.

The physicality enshrined by the neuroscientists as the measure of all things is not objectivity but instead a pure artifact of the scale at which and the means by which we and our devices perceive. So to invoke it as the test and standard of reality is quintessentially anthropocentric.

Beauty is a conversation between humankind and reality. . . .

At very best there are two major problems with ideology. The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality. It is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe. And the second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault here lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary.

think most people feel a difference between their real lives and the lives they have in the world. But they ignore their souls, or hide them, so they can keep things together, keep an ordinary life together.

Sacredness is realized in the act of attention because reality is communicative and the mind is made, grace assisting exquisite effort, to experience its meaning.

Leaving here is like waking from a trance.

It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.

The feeling of an overplus of meaning in reality, a sense that the world cannot at all be accounted for in its own terms, is a profound bond and understanding between and among religious people.