Quotes About Reality

According to conviction, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real me than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is

What, above all, I'm primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, that's it, really. I'm taking the pith out of reality.

Hawai'i is not truly the idyllic paradise of popular songs--islands of love and tranquility, where nothing bad ever happens. It was and is a place where people work and struggle, live and die, as they do the world over.

Preparing to live your dream is postponing it. You are either living it, or not.

Your thoughts do not create reality, but they do create your experience.

Sort of like the pilot saying, "We're gonna make Chicago on time, but only if we jettison all our baggage!" I've seen product managers sacrifice not only design, but testing, function, features, integration, documentation, and reality. Most product managers that I have worked with would rather ship a failure on time than risk going late.

If that was your reality, I think you'd have a completely different attitude about the value of life, including your own. Mostly,

The universe is full of dead people who lived by assumption.

When people don't have access to facts, they invent what they'd like to believe, or what they think others would like to hear.

Space is substance.

Well, I did go. To Auschwitz. And the warning was correct. Not because I was not permitted to describe what I had seen, but because I could not describe what I had seen. The piles of glasses. The piles of shoes. The piles of bones. The piles of human hair. I thought that I had never seen the kind of thinking that did this, that I had never seen this kind of reality. Not in movies, not in theater. Yet it was real.

Theer's no use saying pigs conner fly, when you see them catching swallows.

For at the very moment you have Now, it flees. It is gone. It is, on the instant, Then. Surely.

Transformation happens less by arguing cogently about something new than by generating active new practices that shift the experience of the basis for reality. In other words, the best way of making ideas have impact is to embed them into the very rhythms and habits of the community in the form of common tools and practices.

Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.

But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?

Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.

Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant…

No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and even the best of men must be content with fragment, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

Happiness is the most insidious prison of all.

It was not his habit to dwell on what might have been but what could never be.

I'm still living the life where you get home and open the fridge and there's half a pot of yogurt and a half a can of flat Coca-Cola.