Quotes About Reality

What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?

In order to heal the external world, we must begin within. Reality is always a reflection of what's on the inside. It's a law:

As the saying goes, "If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got." If we're finding it hard to fulfill our needs, there's something within us (most likely a thought process or belief governed by fear) that needs to change so that we can create a different reality.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.

There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.

Were revolutions ever really that we thought them to be?

Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is often described as the result of having a great many ducks lined up in a row - spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences - even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.

I picked up a book on wilderness survival by Laurence Gonzalez and found in it this telling sentence: The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits. His point is that when the two seem incompatible, we often hang onto the plan, ignore the warnings reality offers us and plunge into trouble. Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness. (Woolf's Darkness)

James Baldwin famously wrote, "If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

Measured over too short a span, change becomes imperceptible; people mistake today's peculiarities for eternal verities.

It's important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.

A better world, yes; a perfect world, never.

To say that the emperor has no clothes is a nice anti-authoritarian gesture, but to say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inverted version of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.

More than any other city, [Paris] has entered the paintings and the novels of those under its sway, so that representation and reality reflect each other like a pair of facing mirrors, and walking Paris is often described as reading, as though the city itself were a huge anthology of tales. It exerts a magnetic attraction over its citizens and its visitors, for it has always been the capital of refugees and exiles as well as of France.

Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be?

One of the rights that the powerful often assume is the power to dictate reality.

Comfort is often a code word for the right to be unaware.

The current President's verbal abuse of language itself - with his slurred, sloshing semi-coherent word salad and his insistence that truth and fact are whatever he wants them to be, even if he wants them to be different from what they were yesterday, no matter what else he's serving, he's always serving meaninglessness.

Don't mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don't believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present, or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future...Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don't have that memory, and that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans

Or as my friend, the criminal-defense investigator who knows insanity and violence intimately, put it, "When one begins to lose touch with reality, the ill brain latches obsessively and delusionally onto whatever it's immersed in—the surrounding culture's illness.

We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is.

It was a kind of collective gaslighting. To live in a war that no one around me would acknowledge as a war.

Alguna vez las revoluciones fueron lo que pensamos que serían?