Quotes About Reality

To live consciously, I need to be sensitive to these distinctions. What I perceive, what I interpret it to mean, and how I feel about it are three separate questions. If I do not distinguish among them, my grounding in reality becomes the first casualty.

To the untrue man, the whole universe is false- it is impalpable- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself is in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.

I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.

To the untrue man, the whole universe is false--it is impalpable--it shrinks to nothing within his grasp.

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality.

It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit's joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false—it is impalpable—it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.

Thus I did with Susan as with most other things in my earlier days, dipping her image into my mind and coloring it of a thousand fantastic hues, before I could see her as she really was.

Ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical.

It might be that he lived a more real life within his thoughts...

Many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later, --oftener sooner than late,-- is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.

Thou are my only reality-- all other people are but shadows to me: all events and actions, in which thou dost not mingle, are but dreams.

Podría ser que viviese una vida más real en su fuero interno que en el ambiente tan ingrato de la oficina del administrador. Las evocaciones del desfile, el tumulto de la batalla, las melodías de viejas músicas heroicas, escuchadas treinta años atrás, tales escenas y ecos estaban aún vivos en su recuerdo.

In der Bitterkeit und Qual meines Herzens habe ich gelacht über den Gegensatz zwischen dem, was ich scheine, und dem, was ich bin! Und auch Satan lacht darüber!

Little, impalpable worlds, were those soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as imagination, on the nothing of their surface.

What a terrible thing it is to try to let off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world!

That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere ... the firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.

Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality.

Yes! - these were her realities - all else had vanished!

Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime.

And as for Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly than this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality.

Is there no reality in the penitence thus sealed and witnessed by good works?

Success presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild hallucination.

To the untrue man, the whole universe is false?—it is impalpable?—it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself, in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist

I find nothing so singular in life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.