Quotes About Reality

I cannot, therefore, perceive external things, but can only infer their existence from my own inner perception, by taking the perception as the effect of which something external must be the proximate cause.

How could she tell her that sometimes people didn't get what they wanted? That maybe they were wrong to ever want it in the first place.

Her grandfather's books [...] opened before Ada, a world whose colours were so dazzling that reality paled in comparison and faded away. Boris Godunov, Satan, Athalia, King Lear: they all spoke words charged with meaning; every syllable was inexpressively precious

Genius cannot simply float in the clouds, it must also operate down on earth.

Quando un figlio è piccolo, ci si crea un'immagine ideale di quello che sarà più tardi, e quell'immagine, come una maschera, nasconde il suo volto autentico che non si conoscerà mai.

Perchè l'uomo, per vivere, ha bisogno di un minimo di aria respirabile, di una certa dose di ossigeno e di illusioni.

They looked around and expected some miracle: a car, a truck, anything that would take them. But nothing came. So they headed out of Paris on foot, past the city gates, dragging their bags behind them in the dust, then on into the suburbs, into the countryside, all the while thinking, "This can't be happening! I must be dreaming!

She could feel a bell-shaped pink flower brushing her lips. Later, she would remember that while they were stretched out on the ground, a small white butterfly was lazily flitting from one flower to another. Finally she heard a voice whisper, "It's over; they're gone." She stood up and automatically brushed the dust from her skirt. No one, she thought, had been hurt. But after walking for a few minutes, they saw the first fatalities: two men and a woman.

Some day, he thought, I would like to meet a monster who LOOKS like a monster.

But it was hard to immerse yourself in a fictional tale, no matter how exciting, when your life was beginning to feel like a bestselling thriller.

I've also been responsible for investigating plenty of strange stories. I intend to approach yours the same way I approached those — with an assumption that it represents reality until proven otherwise

Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.

Art and psychoanalisis give shape and meaning to life and that's why we adore them. However, life as it is lived has no shape nor meaning, and that's what I am experiencing right now.

Your love for me does not exist in the real world. Yes, it is love, I do not deny it. But not every love has a course to run, smooth or otherwise, and this love has no course at all . . . But that is remote from love and remote from ordinary life. As real people we do not exist for each other.

Cuál es la diferencia que existe entre yo y estas pequeñas y humildes criaturas? La araña teje su tela, no puede hacer otra cosa. Yo tejo mi conciencia, esta charlatana compulsiva, esta voz vaga y errabunda que pronto enmudecerá. Pero todo es un sueño. La realidad es demasiado dura.

Of course we live in dreams and by dreams, and even in a disciplined spiritual life, in some ways especially there, it is hard to distinguish dream from reality. In ordinary human affairs humble common sense comes to one's aid. For most people common sense is moral sense. But you seem to have deliberately excluded this modest source of light. Ask yourself, what really happened between whom all those years ago? You've made it into a story, and stories are false.

It's not my fault! It can't make any difference, can it? You understand nothing. You are a destroyer, a black spiteful destroyer. You are the sort of person who goes around in a dream smashing things . . . You aren't really here at all.

Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.

You seem to think the past is unreal, a pit full of ghosts. But to me the past is in some ways the most real thing of all, and loyalty to it the most important thing of all.

I accused Hartley of being a 'fantasist', or perhaps that was Titus's word, but what a 'fantasist' I have been myself. I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place.

Tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify. The good artist is a vehicle of truth Great art is able to display and discuss the central area of our reality, our actual consciousness, in a more exact way than science or even philosophy can.