Quotes About Reality

The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, skepticism: c.f. the Upanishads, the Taoists and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.

But we can be nearly sure that those whose love for God has caused their pure loves here below to disappear are false friends of God.   Our neighbour, our friends, religious ceremonies and the beauty of the world do not fall in rank to unreal things after direct contact between God and the soul. On the contrary, only then do these things become real. Previously, they were half-dreams. Previously, they had no reality.

Cut away ruthlessly everything that is imaginary in your feelings.

The reality of the world is the result of our attachment. It is the reality of the self which we transfer into things. It has nothing to do with independent reality. That is only perceptible through total detachment. Should only one thread remain, there is still attachment.

Either God is not all-powerful, or God is not absolutely good, or God does not command wherever He has the power to do so. So the existence of evil here below, far from being a proof against the reality of God, is what reveals Him to us in truth.

Yes, we are dreaming. Men of action and enterprise are dreamers; they prefer dream to reality. But they use arms to make others dream their dreams. The victor lives his dream; the vanquished lives another's dream.

Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.

Le danger n'est pas que l'âme doute s'il y a ou non du pain, mais qu'elle se persuade par un mensonge qu'elle n'a pas faim. Elle ne peut se le persuader que par un mensonge, car la réalité de sa faim n'est pas une croyance, c'est une certitude.

Il faut avoir eu par la joie la révélation de la réalité pour trouver la réalité dans la souffrance. Autrement la vie n'est qu'un rêve plus ou moins mauvais. Il faut parvenir à trouver une réalité plus pleine encore dans la souffrance qui est néant et vide. De même il faut aimer beaucoup la vie pour aimer encore davantage la mort.

Les choses sensibles sont réelles en tant que choses sensibles, mais irréelles en tant que biens. L'apparence a la plénitude de la réalité, mais en tant qu'apparence. En tant qu'autre chose qu'apparence, elle est erreur. (...) Le temps, à proprement parler, n'existe pas (sinon le présent comme limite), et pourtant c'est à cela que nous sommes soumis. Telle est notre condition. Nous sommes soumis à ce qui n'existe pas.

Faith and repentance are not static, the decision of a moment; they are the lifelong realities of a new heart (8:10; 10:16).

There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!

She laughed at herself when she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as much as ever.

I wrote 'It Can't Happen Here,' but I began to think it certainly can.

They were brave and romantic, tragic and distinguished, and Doremus became a little sick of them all and of the final brutality of fact that no normal man can very long endure another's tragedy, and that friendly weeping will some day turn to irritated kicking.

I am reluctantly considering the Academy (American Academy of Arts and Letters) because it is so perfect an example of the divorce in America of intellectual life from all authentic standards of importance and reality.

Paris, that feminine and flirtatious refuge from reality.

He felt like a man who has asked for a drink of cold charged water and found it warm and flat.

It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?

If my future were black, it was better surely to face it like a man than to attempt to brighten it by mere will-o'-the-wisps of the imagination.

If my future were black, it was better surely to face it like a man than to attempt to brighten it by mere will-o'-wisps of the imagination.

El mundo está lleno de cosas obvias, que nadie por casualidad alguna vez observa.

Mi querido Watson, no estoy de acuerdo con los que opinan que la modestia es una virtud. Para la mente lógica, todo debería verse exactamente tal como es, y subestimarse es algo tan lejano de la realidad como exagerar nuestras propias facultades.

Lucy Ashton, in short, was involved in those mazes of the imagination which are most dangerous to the young and the sensitive. Time, it is true, absence, change of place and of face, might probably have destroyed the illusion in her instance as it has done in many others.