Quotes About Reality

Q]uantum physics is not replaced by another sort of physics at large scales. It actually gives rise to classical physics. Our everyday, commonsense reality is, in this view, simply what quantum mechanics looks like when you're six feet tall.

Science asymptotically approaches reality.

Before you leave here, Sir, you're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.

I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring. Had it not been for the fear that I was going crazy, I would have found it an interesting experience, a trip such as no drug could possibly produce. Asleep and dreaming, I saw dead men living; awake, I saw living men dead.

The truth is, the truth is elusive.

members of any small cohesive group tend to maintain esprit de corps by unconsciously developing a number of shared illusions and related norms that interfere with critical thinking and reality testing.

Despair ... is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality - it's a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.

The avoidance of reality has pervaded our language and even the way we understand what's happening around us, as the late comedian George Carlin pointed out. People have invented a 'soft language' to insulate themselves from the truth, he said, 'toilet paper became bathroom tissue … The [garbage] dump became a landfill … Partly cloudy became partly sunny.

A twisted sort of shyness has evolved as the digital self becomes less and less like the real-life operator. The ego is the playmaker; the character is the observer, as the external world shrinks to the size of Billy's bedroom.

Openings and closings, beginnings and endings. Everything in between passes as quickly as the blink of an eye. An eternity precedes the opening and another, if not the same, follows the closing. Somehow everything that lies in between seems for a moment more vivid. What is real to us becomes forgotten, and what we don't understand will be forgotten, too.

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of physical reality.

The appropriate attitude to mystical experiences for those who haven't had them is probably one of agnosticism, the withholding of belief either that mystical experiences provide genuine insight into the nature of reality or that they are delusions.

Contemporary materialism is not a solution but a stubborn refusal to face up to the problem.

This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.

The visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough.

It was the essence of life to disbelieve in death for one's self, to act as if life would continue forever. And life had to act also as if little issues were big ones. To take a realistic attitude toward life and death meant that one lapsed into unreality. Into insanity. It was ironic that the only way to keep one's sanity was to ignore that one was in an insane world or to act as if the world were sane.

The ideal was the light; the real, the shadow.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.

Reality denied comes back to haunt.

Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.

Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.

I guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure.