Quotes About Reality

Mass delusion is the only thing that keeps a people sane.

And it seems possible, moving to the psychological arena, that people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.

The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).

Only servility requires the realm of illusion.

To all of us the thought of heaven is dear— Why not be sure of it and make it here? No doubt there is a heaven yonder too, But 'tis so far away—and you are near.   Men talk of heaven,—there is no heaven but here; Men talk of hell,—there is no hell but here; Men of hereafters talk, and future lives,— O love, there is no other life—but here.

The tribe that confuses its totems and symbols with reality has succumbed to fetishism and may be in more trouble than it realises.

people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.

It is the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality.

In point of fact, we do not have the option of choosing absolute truth, or faith. We only have the right to say, of those who do claim to know the truth of revelation, that they are deceiving themselves and attempting to deceive - or to intimidate - others.

The values of solidarity, collectivism, and internationalism are not so much desirable as they are actually mandated by nature and reality itself.

For those who find it remarkable that we live in a universe of Something, just wait. Nothingness is heading on a collision course right toward us.

Atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is: wonderfully and shockingly explicable. As an atheist, you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you're ever going to get: to fully inhabit reality, rejoice in it, and do your best finally to leave it better than you found

I have had an unpleasant feeling, such as one has in a dream, that I myself do not exist.

I could never keep anybody for long. And that's because I'm the type which every man imagines he wants, until he gets me; and then he finds he doesn't really, after all.

No. Even now I can't altogether believe that any of this really happened...

But George knows he can't do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself, almost, he is a representative of the hope. And the hope is not false. No. It's just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real.

Oh, I know you. You're soft, like most men. You make up romances about people instead of seeing them as they are.

Christopher Isherwood

Write, live what happens; Life is too sacred for invention – though we may lie about it sometimes, to heighten it.

Mission is not ours; mission is God's. Certainly, the mission of God is the prior reality out of which flows any mission that we get involved in. Or, as has been nicely put, it is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world but that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission-God's mission.14

Good and bad are just constructs people use.

A life without truth is illogical. Surak wrote that the truth is simply the actual state of the universe. To live at odds with the truth is to be in conflict with reality itself. Such an existence is unsustainable.

When the images of power overshadow the reality, those without power find themselves fighting phantoms.

In real life, as opposed to pluralist fantasy, every moral and cultural choice of any consequence rules out a whole series of other choices. In an age of images and ideology, however, the difference between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly elusive.