Quotes About Reality

And yet even this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again--unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality.

I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people van be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.

But these men are your brothers - your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.

Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult.

I mean, I think you've got to be truthful about the life you have. Otherwise, there's no possibility of achieving the life you want.

Most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color. And this leads, imperceptibly but inevitably, to a state of mind in which, having long ago learned to expect the worst, one finds it very easy to believe the worst.

those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.

All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there.

the myth of the happy darky and Gone With the Wind. And the North Americans appear to believe these legends, which they have created and which absolutely nothing in reality corroborates, until today. And when these legends are attacked, as is happening now—all over a globe which has never been and never will be White—my countrymen become childishly vindictive and unutterably dangerous.

Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality.

We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.

Because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.

Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.

The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.

What you people don't know,' she said, 'is that life is a bitch, baby. It's the biggest hype going. You don't have any experience in paying your dues and it's going to be rough on you, baby, when the deal goes down. There're lots of back dues to be collected, and I know damn well you haven't got a penny saved.

Once one has begun to suspect this much about the world — once one has begun to suspect, that is, that one is not, and never will be, innocent, for the reason that no one is — some of the self-protective veils between oneself and reality begin to fall away.

SOMEONE ONCE SAID TO ME that the people in general cannot bear very much reality. He meant by this that they prefer fantasy to a truthful re-creation of their experience.

Whatever the Europeans may actually think of artists, they have killed enough of them off by now to know that they are as real-and as persistent- as rain, snow, taxes or businessmen.

We take our shape within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth.

White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded. White people have managed to get through entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.

if one could read, in the dullness of his eye, anything so real as a future.

But to try and find out what Americans mean is almost impossible because there are so many things they do not want to face.

I think you've got to be truthful about the life you have. Otherwise, there's no possibility of achieving the life you want.