Quotes About Reality

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step. For lasting passion is the dream of a harlot, and from it we wake in despair.

Some things are only real because they represent what we think. When we learn the truth and think it, the old reality is no longer real to us and loses its hold on us. The truth sets us free.

the god stuff is not real.

Remembering dreams is like picking up small jellyfish—they slip through your fingers—and you never know if it's a dream you had or if you added to the dream in the remembering. Sometimes it's hard to know if you're remembering a dream at all, or just a dream about remembering a dream. And if that doesn't make sense, well, neither do dreams.

Nothing's perfect. Especially not me. I'm just like you were. Human. Hanging on. Holding out for a happy ending. But knowing it ends badly. And then being surprised by joy.

start with one true thing

The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.

I am accused of mysticism. I do not, however, hold myself responsible for the fact that man has, everywhere and always, spontaneously developed religious forms of expression, and that the human psyche from time immemorial has been shot through with religious feelings and ideas. Whoever cannot see this aspect of the human psyche is blind, and whoever chooses to explain it away, or to "enlighten" it away, has no sense of reality.

The dream gives a true picture of the subjective state, while the conscious mind denies that this state exists, or recognizes it only grudgingly.

Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or "normal" man to whom the scientific statements refer.

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.

One cannot live from anything except what one is.

The image of the world is half the world.

The highest truth is one and the same with the absurd.

The underlying, primary psychic reality is so inconceivably complex that it can be grasped only at the farthest reach of intuition, and then but very dimly. That is why it needs symbols.

It is precisely the most subjective ideas which, being closest to nature and to the living being, deserve to be called the truest.

Consciousness is a precondition of being.

When something—I must stress this with all possible emphasis—is traced back to a psychic condition or fact, it is very definitely not reduced to nothing and thereby nullified, but is shifted on to the plane of psychic reality

We are still a long way from understanding what it signifies that nothing has any existence, unless some small - and oh, so transitory - consciousness has become aware of it.

The critical philosophy of science became as it were negatively metaphysical--in other words, materialistic--on the basis of an error of judgement; matter was assumed to be a tangible and recognizable reality. Yet this is a thoroughly metaphysical concept hypostatized by uncritical minds. Matter is an hypothesis. When you say "matter," you are really creating a symbol for something unknown, which may just as well be "spirit" or anything else; it may even be God.

Indeed, we must never forget that for us outer reality exists only in so far as we perceive it consciously, and that we cannot prove that it exists "in and by itself.

The psychic is a phenomenal world in itself, which can be reduced neither to the brain nor to metaphysics.

For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us.