Quotes About Reality

Data that conflicts with beliefs is often ignored

He made so many promises," said the deeply disappointed Obama acolyte Barbara Walters five years into the presidency. "We thought that he was going to be . . . the next messiah." The messiah he was clearly not. He was not even an honest man. Lamented Walters, "People feel very disappointed because they expected more.

The heart lies to itself because it must.

To illustrate: to walk ten miles in an enclosed space of ten feet is not really movement. There are not ten miles of space, only time.

Nothing ever happened - Not even this

Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?

Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.

It was all completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.

Rocks are space, and space is illusion.

all day long wearing a hat that wasn't on my head

The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.

Some's bastards, some's ain't. That's the score.

Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness.

What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.

I clearly saw the skeleton underneath all this show of personality what is left of a man and all his pride but bones?

because to me the only thing that matters is the conceptions in my own mind, there has to be no reality anyway to what I suppose is going on (p. 153)

and I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.

And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it's all in my mind.

In a sense, I'm mad (and withdrawn from life) while they're sane, human, normal - but in another sense, I speak from the depths of a vision of truth when I say that this continual jockeying for position is the enemy of life in itself. It may be life, 'life is like that,' it may be human and true, but it's also the death-part of life, and our purpose after all is to live and be true. We'll see.

The dream is already ended and we're already awake in the golden eternity.

I realised either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.

This world is the movie of what everything is, it is one movie, made of the same stuff throughout, belonging to nobody, which is what everything is.

What a horror it would have been if the world was real.