Quotes About Reality

the good-to-great companies continually refined the path to greatness with the brutal facts of reality.

You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

He did not understand—until it was too late—what one university president called the reality of tenured faculty: "A thousand points of no.

You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts.

people worried more about the leader—what he would say, what he would think, what he would do— than they worried about external reality and what it could

The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more

I... had no need for cheering dreams," he wrote. "Facts are better than dreams.

Indeed, the big point of this chapter is not about technology per se. No technology, no matter how amazing—not computers, not telecommunications, not robotics, not the Internet—can by itself ignite a shift from good to great. No technology can make you Level 5. No technology can turn the wrong people into the right people. No technology can instill the discipline to confront brutal facts of reality, nor can it instill unwavering faith.

A naive belief in supernatural powers has been dispelled

A man's fate is a man's fate and life is but an illusion.

No tienes que llorar, O-chan. La vida sólo es un sueño dentro de un sueño —dijo el viejo

Tomorrow does not exist. There is only now .

Yesterday, because of Mrs. Struan's letter to him, he had been confronted with an immortal truth: however loyal you are to a company, however much service you give "the company," the company can and will spit you out at its whim, without conscience.

A lot of bull that's worshipped as the be-all and end-all of existence. So much of 'normal, civilized' life is bull that you can't imagine it. For us ex-Changi-ites—we're lucky, we're cleansed, we know what life is really all about. What frightens you, doesn't frighten me, what frightens me, you'd laugh at.

A human being is a part of the whole called by us "Universe"—a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. Albert Einstein

When even the bartenders lose their romantic notions, it's time for a better world.

Neither triumphalism, condemnation, nor apology does intellectual or emotional justice to the brute reality of this savage war, the outcome of which could not have been known in the moment.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake. —Henry David Thoreau

There's a world we can't see. It exists separately and concurrently with the real world. You enter this world by the offering of prayer and incantation. You live in this world wholly within your mind. You dispel the real world through mental discipline. You rebuff the real world through your enforced mental will. Your interior world will give you what you want and what you need to survive.

Memory is a mirage that fools the heart . . .

The fatality rate is 100%. But then things get very weird.

We live in a world of endless transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true.

Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.

In our zeal to become the landlords of our own being, we cling to each achievement as a kind of verification of our self-proclaimed reality. We become the center and God somehow recedes to an invisible fringe. Others become real to the extent they become significant others to the designs of our own ego. And in this process the ALL of God dies in us and the sterile nothingness of our desires becomes our God.