Quotes About Reality

Did adults just look at the world and see what they wanted to see, think what they wanted to think? Did evidence and experience mean nothing?

Mama had quit high school and "lived on love." That was how she always put it, the fairy tale. Now Leni was old enough to know that like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.

Tragedy was like that, a razor that sliced through time, severing the now from the before, incising the what-might-have-been from reality as cleanly as any surgeon's blade.

Liam learned that it was possible to appear to move forward when you were really standing still.

courage was a lie. It was just fear that you ignored.

The only real thing in this icy blue-and-black world is my daughter's hand in mine.

in reality only a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a renewal in the spirit of nations. Everything begins with the individual.

That is the great and liberating thing about any genuine personality: he voluntarily sacrifices himself to his vocation, and consciously translates into his own individual reality what would only lead to ruin if it were lived unconsciously by the group

The more a person shrinks from adapting himself to reality, the greater becomes the fear which increasingly besets his path at every point. Thus a vicious circle is formed: fear of life and people causes more shrinking back, and this in turn leads to infantilism and finally "into the mother".

What most people overlook or seem unable to understand is the fact that I regard the psyche as real.

If a man imagined that I was his arch-enemy and killed me, I should be dead on account of mere imagination. Imaginary conditions do exist and they may be just as real and just as harmful or dangerous as physical conditions. I even believe that psychic disturbances are far more dangerous than epidemics [of physical disease] or earthquakes.

Quem olha do lado de fora sonha; quem olha do lado de dentro desperta

The heart— at last nothing but a muscle moving, not at all the talisman you'd imagined: how if only you could touch it—how everything, everything might yet be different if you did . . .

the way art can become, eventually, all we have of what was true.

I closed my eyes. I dreamed again the dream called Yes: the worst is true .

once an experience is fully in awareness, fully accepted, then it can be coped with effectively, like any other clear reality.

We live by a perceptual "map" which is never reality itself.

The term "congruent" is one I have used to describe the way I would like to be. By this I mean that whatever feeling or attitude I am experiencing would be matched by my awareness of that attitude. When this is true, then I am a unified or integrated person in that moment, and hence I can be whatever I deeply am. This is a reality which I find others experience as dependable.

If God's words determine reality, then of all the things a pastor does, speaking the words of God to the congregation is the most important.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

An historical truth is only true once

But everything takes a different shape when we pass from abstractions to reality. In the former, everything must be subject to optimism, and we must imagine the one side as well as the other striving after perfection and even attaining it. Will this ever take place in reality?