Quotes About Reality

Alcohol is necessary for a man so that he can have a good opinion of himself, undisturbed be the facts.

It is a case not of the Emperor's but of the Everyman's New Clothes.

Militant nationalism needed regular transfusions of young blood to keep it alive, because it led a kind of vampiric half-life, imaginatively and emotionally draining but not visible in any mirror held up to contemporary Irish reality.

You can live your whole life in your brain and not experience what's around you. You go crazy that way.

It is this process of symbolization which, in certain hasheesh states, gives every tree and house, every pebble and leaf, every footprint, feature, and gesture, a significance beyond mere matter or form, which possesses an inconceivable force of tortures or of happiness.

By a fortunate dispensation of providence, Russians possess a natural gift of make-believe. ... For them, as for no other race, the real and the imaginary, the actual and the symbolic, the literal and the figurative, tend to overlap and become one.

Anybody who has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition ... must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect.

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

I preach that there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.

Children lose interest in their parents when they are left. They are not sentimental. They are passionate and cold. [...] They learn to pretend. And pretense becomes the most active, the realest part, alluring as dreams. It takes place of what we think is real. - pg. 11-12

The cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down.

She wanted to hold on to the rosy candlelight glow of romance, rather than have to deal with the bright, sometimes glaring day-to-day life with another person. And who could blame her?

Unless your daily life from Monday to Saturday is a life of worship, there will not be much reality in your public worship on Sunday.

What you see with your inner eye (the imaging faculty) you meet sooner or later on the external. So see clearly your goodness, your health, your success, your happiness; and they will come to pass. Faith brings fruit.

You have built up a fixed idea that "Life is hard and filled with disappointments." You will meet these thoughts as concrete experiences in life, for "Out of the imaginations of the heart come the issues of life.

the pictures man sees there, and sooner or later he meets his own creations in his outer world.

If you were wide a-wake to your good, you could not be troubled and fearful! Waking up to the truth, that there is no loss, lack or failure in the kingdom of reality—loss, lack and failure would disappear from your life. They come from your own vain imaginings.

You hear certain things, negative things, all the time that aren't true, but you never hear about the positive.

If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?