Quotes About Reality

Like the Babylonians, the Aryans were quite aware that their myths were not factual accounts of reality but expressed a mystery that not even the gods themselves could explain adequately. When they tried to imagine how the gods and the world had evolved from primal chaos, they concluded that nobody—not even the gods—could understand the mystery of existence:

Our experience tells us that the world has objective reality and a perfect God, who must, be truthful, could not deceive us. Instead of using the world to prove the existence of God, therefore, Descartes had used the idea of God to give him faith in the reality of the world.

The Buddha did not deny the gods, therefore, but believed that the ultimate Reality of nirvana was higher than the gods. When Buddhists experience bliss or a sense of transcendence in meditation, they do not believe that this results from contact with a supernatural being. Such states are natural to humanity; they can be attained by anybody who lives in the correct way and learns the techniques of Yoga. Instead of relying on a god, therefore, the Buddha urged his disciples to save themselves.

We pray for what is "to come," not for what already exists. The "event" does not require "belief" in a static, unchanging deity who "exists" but inspires us to make what is "astir" in the name "God"— absolute beauty, peace, justice, and selfless love—a reality in the world.

We do not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming

For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.

Perhaps to them the first condition for anything having real charm was this: that it must not really exist.

Why the Kikuyu, who personally have so little fear of death, should be so terrified to touch a corpse, while the white people, who are afraid to die, handle the dead easily, I do not know. Here once more you feel their reality to be different from our realities.

Qué pasaría si vuestro Luis Felipe dijera al vernos a nosotros tan a gusto en el infierno: Esto es una farsa, un engaño. Esta gente ha estado en el infierno desde su nacimiento.?

I'm very happy that you're following your dreams. I've discovered that they fragile things and must be fed if they are to live long enough to turn into reality. There are only two things that will feed a dream: action and honesty. If you are honest enough to face your dream, with all its limitations, and willing to take whatever action is necessary to make up for those limitations, then there is a good chance you will be one of the few to succeed.

The Days can spin yarns that seem so real that if one of them told you a tale about a blizzard, you'd get frostbite even if you were standing in your kitchen on the hottest day of the year.

Most people managed to evade home truths with astonishing ease.

A normal human being… does not exist.

But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.

What chimps don't seem capable of understanding is the state of false belief. They don't have a theory of mind that accounts for actions driven by beliefs in conflict with reality. And really, who lacking that will ever be able to navigate the human world?

Apparently, all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary.

There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened.

You might be shown the photos of the space chimps in their helmets, grinning from ear to ear, and you might feel an urge to tell the rest of your class that chimps grin like that only when they're frightened, that no amount of time among humans will change it. Those happy-looking space chimps in those pictures are frankly terrified and maybe you just barely stop yourself from saying so.

My uncle Bob sees the whole world in a fun-house mirror, TRUST NO ONE lipsticked luridly across its bowed face.

But I knew that, both in fairyland and the real world, too, wishes were a slipperier things.

He kept his eyes down. He was hiding nothing, but the truth is no servant to man. You can't make someone believe you just by telling the truth any more than you can make the truth false just by not believing it.

But the most fantastical of my imaginary worlds turned out to be the one I'd thought was real. As a child, I believed the world was run by competent, sane and benevolent adults. I believed this for much longer than I believed in Santa Claus. That belief has since gone down like the Titanic (on which I also spent a lot of time as a child). The world is run by nitwits and psychopaths.

solipsism. According to solipsism, reality exists only inside

The other important thing to understand is that as humans we see only a segment of reality in the greater cosmic scheme of things, so we are really never in a position to judge anyone or anything.