Quotes About Reality

For the world is but a woman with all her mystery and loveliness; and though we may attend her as if we were physician, scientist, business partner, love will go quicker to reality than these and find the inner being of the world.

As an end and finality of life love has its deeper meaning, for it sinks below the surfaces of casual emotion, of feeling, of happiness, to profound realities. Beyond possession, and personality and play--not against them--love penetrates to realms that intuition finds ultimately real. It seeks identity with being; it wants divine approach.

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.

That a sublime genius like the divine Plato could have been absolutely convinced of the reality of the divine idea shows us how contagious, how omnipotent, is the tradition of the religious mania even on the greatest minds.

Life doesn't work that way. You can do everything perfectly. Do everything you think you're supposed to be doing. Fulfill every expectation that other people may have. And you still won't get the results you think you deserve. Life is crazy and maddening and often makes no sense.

Assumptions are dangerous things. I like facts a lot better.

I bet you think we're in a g***am park. You don't know we're in one of the world's great jungles. You don't know that behind all them damn dainty trees and sh*t, people are screwing and fixing and dying. Dying, baby, right now while we move through this darkness in this man's taxicab. And you don't know it, even when you're told; you don't know it, even when you see it.

An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That's all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn't care.

One cannot dwell on these things, these echoes of what might, in some other age, and in some other body, have been; one must attempt to deal with what is, or else go under, or go mad. And yet--to deal with what is! Who can do it?

We now know too much about matter to be materialists.

Things are not changed by a mere change of place, but a change of place relative to an observer always changes their appearance for him. Common sense is, therefore, compelled in this, as in countless other cases, to distinguish the appearance of a thing from its reality; and to hold, as an essential article of its working creed, that appearances may alter, leaving realities unchanged.

The fact is, of course, that the metaphysician wants to re-think the universe; the plain man does not. The metaphysician seeks for an inclusive system where all reality can be rationally housed. The plain man is less ambitious. He is content with the kind of knowledge he possesses about men and things—so far as it goes. Science has already told him much; each day it tells him more. And, within the clearing thus made for him in the tangled wilderness of the unknown, he feels at home.

True beliefs are effects no less than false. In this respect magic and mathematics are on a level.

As, therefore, nature knows nothing of good intentions, rewarding and punishing not motives but actions; as things are what they are, describe them as we may, and their consequences will be what they will be.

There are for all men moments when the need for some general point of view becomes insistent; when neither labor, nor care, nor pleasure, nor idleness, nor habit will stop a man from asking how he is to regard the universe of reality, how he is to think of it as a whole, how he is to think of his own relation to it.

Few persons are prevented from thinking themselves right by the reflection that, if they be right, the rest of the world is wrong.

Who is right? How do we know? Where is the answer written? Perhaps it's not written anywhere ... or perhaps it is written all around us, in letters so big that we can't see them! Imagine that, we could be walking on a world where the answer is all around us, and we can't even see it!

These days even reality has to look artificial.

Either the world is at fault, or we're looking for meaning in the wrong places.

We're building prisons all over the world and calling them luxury condos.

Appearances proved nothing and everything.

Theories are very thin and unsubstantial; experience only is tangible.

Il y a deux Histoires : l'Histoire officielle, menteuse qu'on enseigne, l'Histoire ad usum delphini puis l'Histoire secrète, où sont les véritables causes des événements, une histoire honteuse