Quotes About Reality

Is there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside our thought?

We don't have to invent wildly implausible stories: we have the joy and excitement of real scientific investigation and discovery to keep our imaginations in line. And in the end that is more exciting than fantasy.

Per quanto noi possiamo deplorare una cosa, questo non le impedisce di essere vera.

More sophisticated theologians proclaim the sexlessness of God, while some feminist theologians seek to redress historic injustices by designating her female. But what, after all, is the difference between a non-existent female and a non-existent male? I suppose that, in the ditzily unreal intersection of theology and feminism, existence might indeed be a less salient attribute than gender.

What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real world but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data - a model that is constructed so that it is useful for dealing with the real world.

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.

Science-fiction authors, such as Daniel F. Galouye in Counterfeit World, have even suggested (and I cannot think how to disprove it) that we live in a computer simulation, set up by some vastly superior civilization.

If you think you understand quantum theory . . . you don't understand quantum theory.'*

If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking can undo it.

David Deutsch, in The Fabric of Reality, embraces the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum theory

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world. Whether

Bir yan?lg?dan bir kiÅŸi ac? çekiyorsa, buna delilik denir. Bir yan?lg?dan birçok insan ac? çektiÄŸinde ise buna Din denir.

Problems arise when (especially) theologians use such metaphorical language without realizing that that is what they are doing, and without even realizing that there is a distinction between metaphor and reality – saying something like: 'It is not important whether Jesus really fed the five thousand. What matters is what the idea of the story means to us.' Actually it is important, because millions of devout people do believe the Bible is literally true.

There is real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

Realism is the embrace of disappointment, in order no longer to be disappointed. 4 "So I came to the city, my friend," the Doll then told Jodie, "what of it?

They felt their own judgements absolute and the judgements of others idiocy or wickedness deserving the worst punishment. It was as if everyone had to believe their own story—any story, really—because if they stopped believing there would only be reality left to deal with. No one doubted, or was unsure; every individual was infallible because it was their truth, and so there could be no truth and the world was wrong.

And this sense, this feeling of communion, would at moments overwhelm him. At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work—an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end.

It's like life, isn't it? You think you'll outrun it, that you're better than it, but it makes a fool of you every time. It runs you into the ground and steams off whistling away, happy as buggery with itself.

All life is only allegory and the real story is not here...

The world is, she would say. It just is, boy.

Rock to gravel to dust to mud to rock and so the world goes, as his mother used to say when he demanded reasons or explanation as to how the world got to be this way or that. The world is, she would say. It just is, boy.

Because not to fear was to imagine a world beyond experience. And that was too much for anybody.

My only idea ever, Dorrigo had confessed, is to advance forward and charge the windmill. Taylor had laughed, but Dorrigo had meant it. It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible, Squizzy, he had explained, in as close to an explanation of himself as he ever offered. It's believing in reality that does us in every time. He

Words are mostly used to keep us asleep, not to wake us.