Quotes About Reality

As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements'; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance.

In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake. But an unwavering and commanding virtue would compel even its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever wakeful authority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should never have dreamed of such a thing. Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses

Do not engage to find things as you think they are.

The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had any thing to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His companion's prayer is forgotten.

If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth.

July 6. I wish to meet the facts of life—the vital facts, which are the phenomena or actuality the gods meant to show us—face to face, and so I came down here. Life! who knows what it is, what it does? If I am not quite right here, I am less wrong than before; and now let us see what they will have.

If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire- thinner than the paper on which it is printed- then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them. Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever.

Foolish people imagine that what they imagine is somewhere else. That stuff is not made in any factory but their own.

but a goose is a goose still

If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairty tale from the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.

If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. <...> Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale

La nostra vera vita è quando siamo svegli nei sogni.

By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.

He had indeed conversed so entirely with money, that it may almost be doubted whether he imagined there was any other thing really existing in the world; this at least may be certainly averred, that he firmly believed nothing else to have any real value.

as the sister often foresaw what never came to pass, so the brother often saw much more than was actually the truth.

In reality, he imagined so many spirits or devils were handling him; for his imagination being possessed with the horror of an apparition, converted every object he saw or felt into nothing but ghosts and spectres.

característica esencial de la inflación es infundir aliento a miles de engañosas ilusiones.>

Don't pass it by--the immediate, the real, the only, the yours.