Quotes About Reality

At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality- the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped. But even more daunting is the second kind of courage - the courage to act on the truth we find.

Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength. At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality—the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped. Such courage is difficult enough. We have many reasons to shrink from it. But even more daunting is the second kind of courage—the courage to act on the truth we find.

Our reverence for independence takes no account of the reality of what happens in life: sooner or later, independence will become impossible. Serious illness or infirmity will strike . It is as inevitable as sunset. And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?

At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality—the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped.

Reality is more complex, though. People readily demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice their safety and survival for the sake of something beyond themselves, such as family, country, or justice. And this is regardless of age.

He knew our hospital was affiliated with Harvard, but he knew enough to realize that this did not necessarily mean we were anything special.

But finding a good idea is apparently not all that hard. Finding an entrepreneur who can execute a good idea is a different matter entirely. One needs a person who can take an idea from proposal to reality, work the long hours, build a team, handle the pressures and setbacks, manage technical and people problems alike, and stick with the effort for years on end without getting distracted or going insane. Such people are rare and extremely hard to spot.

The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality—the

But that proved not to be the case.

En la vejez y la enfermedad se requieren dos tipos de valor. El primero es el valor para afrontar la realidad de la mortalidad –el valor de querer saber la verdad de lo que cabe temer y lo que cabe esperar–

It requires vigilance over nutrition, medications, and living situations. And it requires each of us to contemplate the unfixable in our life, the decline we will unavoidably face, in order to make the small changes necessary to reshape it. When the prevailing fantasy is that we can be ageless, the geriatrics uncomfortable demand is that we accept we are not.

We're always trotting out some story of a ninety-seven-year-old who runs marathons, as if such cases were not miracles of biological luck but reasonable expectations for all. Then, when our bodies fail to live up to this fantasy, we feel as if we somehow have something to apologize for.

Discussing a fantasy was easier—less emotional, less explosive, less prone to misunderstanding—than discussing what was happening before my eyes.

When the prevailing fantasy is that we can be ageless, the geriatrician's uncomfortable demand is that we accept we are not. *

But the dismal finances of geriatrics are only a symptom of a deeper reality: people have not insisted on a change in priorities.

What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.

It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.

I sit before the typewriter and nothing comes. If feels as if underlining these assaults, lining them up one after the other and looking at them squarely might give them an unbearable power. Yet, I know that the opposite is true-no matter how difficult it may be to look at the realities of our lives, it is there that we will find the strength to change them. And to suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance.

Dilnawaz is the most human, the most friendly, and the most real person I've met here, as well as the most spiritual. She is also the most lonely. She is very friendly and helpful toward everyone, and people respond to her with considerable respect, but there is still an air of isolation about her that says to me she is not quite a part.

would insist it was something else. It was so often her approach to the world; to change reality. If you can't change reality, change your perceptions of it.

The image of the Angolan woman with a baby on one arm and a gun in the other is neither romantic nor fanciful

Lorde asks us to do the more difficult and radical work of imagining what our realities might look like if masculinity were not the ideal to which we aspire, if heterosexuality were not the ideal to which we aspire, if whiteness were not the ideal to which we aspire.

Our dead line our dreams, their deaths becoming more and more commonplace.

No matter what she'd done, you have to say... You have to say, 'It wouldn't have made a bit if difference.