Quotes About Reality

The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan

Getting involved with a victim was kind of like trying to find love on a reality show...rarely successful.

Your view of the world is just as skewed as someone who has never seen combat... We all state our convictions from within our convictions.

La scienza della realtà e della necessità, delle cause e delli effetti, dell'ingegni di puntamento, di percussione e di prótasi, quella sola può leggere dal suo quaderno che in sul capo all'Autore cadrà il pomo dall'albero, piantato nel prato, e disgregatasi invece dalle torri erme dell'alpe cadrà la pietra, cercando il profondo; che il giusto colpo springherà tremendo sopra al bersaglio; e che l'erba, che sarà cresciuta, la mangerà il cavallo, che campato sarà.

Gli storici, scrisse Aristotele (Poetica, 51 b) parlano di quello che è stato (del vero), i poeti parlano di quello che avrebbe potuto essere (del possibile). Ma naturalmente il vero è un punto d'arrivo, non un punto di partenza. Gli storici (e, in modo diverso, i poeti) fanno per mestiere qualcosa che è parte della vita di tutti: districare l'intreccio di vero, falso, finto che è la trama del nostro stare al mondo.

If I am hungry,reality is nothing more to me than an ensemble of more or less edible things. If I am thirsty, reality is more or less liquid, and more or less potable. If I am sleepy, it is a great bed more or less hard.If I am not hungry, not thirsty, not sleepy, and do not need any other determinate thing, the world is a large ensemble of grays that are I don't know what but that certainly are not made to cheer me up.

Because their personal comfort is their reality, the calamity that interrupts it is a transcendent force: the devil.

I believe that he who sows utopia will reap reality.

Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top, we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us.

If I ask whether two events—one on Earth and the other on Proxima b—are happening "at the same moment," the correct answer would be: "It's a question that doesn't make sense, because there is no such thing as 'the same moment' definable in the universe." The "present of the universe" is meaningless.

It is like the point where the rainbow touches the forest. We think that we can see it—but if we go to look for it, it isn't there.

Science is a continual exploration of ways of thinking. Its strength is its visionary capacity to demolish preconceived ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct new and more effective images of the world. This adventure rests upon the entirety of past knowledge, but at its heart is change.

We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces left by the (re)mingling together of things in the world, and oriented toward predicting events in the future, toward the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this immense, chaotic universe.

An elementary structure of the world is emerging, generated by a swarm of quantum events, where time and space do not exist. Quantum fields draw together space, time, matter, and light, exchanging information between one event and another. Reality is a network of granular events; the dynamic that connects them is probabilistic; between one event and another, space, time, matter, and energy melt into a cloud of probability.

We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is being in time.

Things" in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous

Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same.

The world is like a collection of interrelated points of view.

What I see, in other words, is not a reproduction of the external world. It is what I expect, corrected by what I can grasp. The relevant input is not that which confirms what we already know, but that which contradicts our expectations.

Quantum theory is of no direct help in understanding the mind.

Those who defend this way of thinking about reality—eternalism—frequently cite Einstein, who in a famous letter writes: For people like us who believe in physics the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Newton's mechanics, Maxwell's equations, quantum mechanics, and so on, tell us how events happen, not how things are.

To ask oneself in general what exists or what is real means only to ask how would you like to use a verb and an adjective; it's a grammatical question, not a question about nature. Nature, for its part, is what it is, and we discover it very gradually. If our grammar and our intuition do not readily adapt to what we discover, well, too bad. We must seek to adapt them.

Time opens up our limited access to the world. Time, then, is the form in which we beings, whose brains are made up essentially of memory and foresight, interact with the world: it is the source of identity.