Quotes About Reality

If you're fanatical enough about enacting and enforcing your fiction, it becomes indistinguishable from nonfiction

technology that seems magical and miraculous can encourage and confirm credulous people's belief in make-believe magic and miracles.

THE BIG PIECE of secular conventional wisdom about Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God's glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.

As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: If I think it's true, no matter why or how I think it's true, then it's true, and nobody can tell me otherwise. That's the real-life reductio ad absurdum of American individualism. And it would become a credo of Fantasyland.

mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." —PHILIP K. DICK

We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem.

People think of life as being so sacred and they feel like this is their only chance and they have to do something with their life and make an impact As far as I'm concerned, it's just a pitstop for the afterlife. It's just a little test to see how you can handle reality.

N????? ???s ? ?????? ... L??? ????s ?s ???!

Nobody dies a virgin... Life fucks us all.

In a market, preceptions could be as important as reality. p.403

The meaning of world is the separation of wish and fact.

Our total reality and total existence are beautiful and meaningful . . . . We should judge reality by the little which we truly know of it. Since that part which conceptually we know fully turns out to be so beautiful, the real world of which we know so little should also be beautiful. Life may be miserable for seventy years and happy for a million years: the short period of misery may even be necessary for the whole.

Bemerkung: Sonderbarerweise sind auch die Tatsachen, welche wir absolut sicher wissen (2 + 2 = 4, ich heiße Kurt) aus Begriffen zusammengesetzt, die wir nicht vollkommen verstehen (und die sehr kompliziert sind). 2 Erklärungen dafür: 1.) Das Einfache in der Welt sind die Tatschen und nicht die Begriffe. 2.) Diese sicheren Tatschen sind so, dass sie bei einem sehr weiten Spielraum von möglichen Interpretationen für Begriffe gelten.

There is a difference between a thing and talking about a thing.

Only someone who (like the Intuitionist) denies that the concepts and axioms of classical set theory have any meaning could be satisfied with such a solution, not someone who believes them to describe some well-determined reality. For in reality Cantor's conjecture must be either true or false, and its undecidability from the axioms as known today can only mean that these axioms do not contain a complete description of reality.

This is what is known as perspective, and it is a swindle.

we live 24 minutes too late and that is viewed from the right side

Erst habe ich gemerkt, wie das Leben ist. Und dann habe ich verstanden, warum es so ist, und dann habe ich begriffen, warum es nicht anders sein kann. Und doch möchte ich, daß es anders wird.

Die Welt zerfällt in Groß- und Kleingedrucktes.

Der Satiriker ist ein gekränkter Idealist: er will die Welt gut haben, sie ist schlecht, und nun rennt er gegen das Schlechte hin.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.