Quotes About Reality

What all this means is that learning the impossible is possible augments our ability to see ourselves doing the impossible, which triggers a systemic change in the body and the brain, which closes the gap between fantasy and reality. It also makes us significantly more flow prone.

The difference in the quality of consciousness between dreaming and being awake was close to the difference between our old earth life and the one there.

It was not Gilda and a racquet being used reflexively to some purpose. It was not Gilda using a racquet. It was one thing, maybe you could call it a Gilda-racquet-court-net-game-situation-two-other-players-wind-sunshine object. But there was only one thing there. To seperate us out would be to miss the reality.

You can't argue with facts. You're not entitled to your own facts.

You talk about deus ex machina, well, we're talking about deus in machina. You start by thinking there's a god in the box. And then you find there isn't anything in the box. You put the god in the box.

I expected no miracles; I wasn't young enough for dreams; I knew in my bones that I couldn't escape my troubles by changing the view from my window.

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

Do you believe that the actor on the stage is really a villain? Let me ask you something else. If he isn't a villain, then is he a liar?

The more the mouse pursues this line of of thought, the more it seems to him that the cat is a large, soft mouse.

That's the problem with Domitian, isn't it?" said Lucius. "We never know what's real and what's not. All the city is a stage. Everything that happens is a spectacle put on by the emperor. One wonders if he himself knows any longer what's real.

In politics, reality and appearance are of equal importance. You cannot attend to one and neglect the other. A man must determine both what he is, and what others believe him to be.

For one thing, I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero.

This is reality, Greg.-Elliot from E.T.

But ignoring something doesn't make it less real, y'know. Something isn't fiction just because you choose not to acknowledge it.

Once again I repeat: the aim pf physics at its most fundamental level is not just to describe the world but ti explain why it is the way it is.

This is often the way it is in physics. Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world.

Democritus wrote books on ethics, natural science, mathematics, and music, of which many fragments survive. One of these fragments expresses the view that all matter consists of tiny indivisible particles called atoms (from the Greek for "uncuttable"), moving in empty space: "Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention; atoms and Void [alone] exist in reality.

What is most striking is not so much that Parmenides and Zeno were wrong as that they did not bother to explain why, if motion is impossible, things appear to move. Indeed, none of the early Greeks from Thales to Plato, in either Miletus or Abdera or Elea or Athens, ever took it on themselves to explain in detail how their theories about ultimate reality accounted for the appearances of things.

I put tape on the mirrors in my house so I don't accidentally walk through into another dimension.

It doesn't matter what temperature a room is, it's always room temperature.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

I saw a man with a wooden leg and a real foot.

Looking at the wingless angel Harold firmly believed her shadow should be in color.

Away with them, away; we should not believe fairy stories if we wish to be good. Think of them as persons from the fairy wood.