Quotes About Reality

There's always going to be that pressure when you're in front of the camera. When you're famous it's just an extreme version of reality and there's a pressure to look a certain way.

There's no such thing as security. There never has been.

Female is real, and it's sex, and femininity is unreal, and it's gender.

Lies are vile things, with a horrible life of their own. They contaminate the truth that surrounds them.

whatever else we are or may pretend to be, we are certainly our bodies

An English wood is like a good many other things in life-- very promising at a distance, but a hollow mockery when you get within. You see daylight on both sides, and the sun freckles the very bracken. Our woods need the night to make them seem what they ought to be--what they once were, before our ancestors' descendants demanded so much more money, in these so much more various days. ("The Striding Place")

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.

Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.

It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.

Whenever you get there, there is no there there.

The story she had told me was possible, but it was not believable.

Every day we lose something; one of the illusions, which are our only riches, perishes or diminishes. Experience or truth divests us every day of part of our possessions. We do not live, except in losing.

Children find everything in nothing, men find nothing in everything.

All is mystery except our pain.

Diceva che i diletti più veri che abbia la nostra vita, sono quelli che nascono dalle immaginazioni false; e che i fanciulli trovano il tutto anche nel niente, gli uomini il niente nel tutto. ( Detti memorabili di Filippo Ottonieri )

Illusions cannot be condemned, despised, and persecuted save by those who are deluded and by those who believe that this world is or truly can be something, and something beautiful. An utterly crucial illusion, and so the half-philosopher combats illusions precisely because he is deluded; the true philosopher loves them and proclaims them because he is not deluded, and combating illusions in general is the surest sign of very imperfect and insufficient wisdom, and notable illusion.

may be known, but is in no way felt" (Z 1099) and the youthful illusions (l'inganno giovanile) that survive into old age (

The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.

rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them ... imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them ... for when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them.

Reality can be entered through the main door or it can be slipped into through a window, which is much more fun.

Nel paese della bugia, la verità è una malattia.

I am not proposing any return to reality—to foundations, to the solidity of an ontology that has its feet on the ground—against the risks of rampant irrationalism, as it seems to me is happening today in certain returns to phenomenology, now combined with the attention of the cognitive sciences

the dissolution of reality in interpretation is also an (act of) interpretation, which puts the historicity of the interpreter into play, and is not a discovery or a shedding of light onto a past error that would be uncovered on the basis of an objective awareness of the facts.

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he can no longer distinguish the truth, within him or around him.