Quotes About Reality

A so-called ideal scheme which does not grow out of reality is definitely and finally not ideal at all.

To theorize' means, to see as a whole. The actual is a small part of the whole, or a single aspect of it, which, when taken by itself is, by reason of its incompleteness, both meaningless and comparatively unreal. To see the actual in its wholeness is to see it filled out with all that it implies, supplemented by that which gives it meaning.

People are not who or where we think they are. And there is someone who watches from an unknown location

We have art,' Nietzsche said, 'so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

A well-told lie is worth a thousand facts

There's no trustworthy recording of ages when seen through the eyes of youth

Wenn wir jung sind, ist uns nicht so sehr die Realität unserer Lage peinlich, sondern wir fürchten uns davor, dass andere sie erkennen und darüber urteilen könnten.

He rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper.

Still, this was broken stone. It was not a human life.

We have art, Nietzsche says, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

He has had more hallucinations recently. He talks about 'When that man was in the kitchen …' and so on. Recently he locked the door in the evening, in case 'those men' got in. He knows by their accents that they are quite cultured, and they are apparently friendly, but it is frightening that they should be so real to him.

The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.

The very nature of perception makes it a predominantly subjective experience.

In keeping with their system-sustaining function, the major news media present reality as a scatter of events and subjects that ostensibly bear little relation to each other or to a larger set of social relations.

Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations-a kind of controlled hallucination.

Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.

Compared with other drugs, psychedelics seldom affect people the same way twice, because they tend to magnify whatever's already going on both inside and outside one's head.

our everyday waking consciousness "is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

On this question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it. "If you wanted to find the blonde who delivered the news last night," Richards offered by way of an analogy, "you wouldn't look for her in the TV set." The television set is, like the human brain, necessary but not sufficient.

the grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief.

The philosophical implications of predictive coding are deep and strange. The model suggests that our perceptions of the world offer us not a literal transcription of reality but rather a seamless illusion woven from both the data of our senses and the models in our memories.

consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains.

if those dried-up little scraps of fungus taught me anything, it is that there are other stranger forms of consciousness available to us, and, whatever they mean, their very existence, to quote William James, forbids[s] a premature closing of our accounts with reality

Normal waking consciousness might seem to offer a faithful map to the territory of reality, and it is good for many things, but it is only a map—and not the only map.