Quotes About Reality

The economy which prefers fictitious money to real, is, at best, like that which prefers a leaky ship to a sound one.

Faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction--faith in fiction is a damnable false hope.

Like everything else I believed in those days, this fantasy of working-classness was strictly theoretical. I had arrived at it by deduction. Businessmen were the working class, I reasoned, because they worked to earn their living.

I honestly thought that Mission Hills, with its castellated palazzi, was normal and that other places were the aberration. I played with the tots of millionaires and convinced myself that America was a classless society, where all that mattered was ability and one's willingness to work.

While its proponents might get the facts wrong, they get the subjective experience right.

Comparison, more than reality, makes men happy or wretched.

If an ass goes travelling he will not come home a horse.

Deceive not thyself by overexpecting happiness in the married estate…. Remember the nightingales which sing only some months in the spring, but commonly are silent when they have hatched their eggs.

Yes, Germany is dark, and Berlin is darker. But it is not so clear in Berlin what part of the dark is now faux dark and what part of the dark is real.

Logically, such a nonoccurrence is just as much an event as an occurrence, but phenomenologically it is not.

Loretta's eyes flashed. "Is that what gets you through the night, Philip?" she asked. "Choosing to believe something, whether it's true or not?" "In one way or another, Loretta, isn't that what gets everyone through the night?" I asked.

Reality has a way of summoning the shadows," I tell him. Fareem laughs his worldly laugh. "Is that the

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Man sagt: gefallen«, verbessert die Mutter. »Als ob er hingefallen wäre? Das verstehe ich nicht. Er ist doch tot.« »Ja.« Der Vater hat sich eine Zigarette angezündet. »Viele sind tot, Hunderttausende liegen tot da draußen. Und vielleicht, weil man sich das nicht vorstellen mag, nennt man es so.«

All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.

Life is nasty, brutish, and short

Quietistic meditation is easier, naturally, but a person who practices it will turn out to be just as insecure and petty as someone not enlightened at all. What is equally important, "leisure-time" meditation that separates our spiritual life from our activities is merely hiding from reality. You cannot come home from the job and suddenly turn on a meditation experience.

the ignorant and the simple minded, not knowing that the world is what is seen of Mind itself, cling to the multitudinousness of external objects, cling to the notions of being and non-being, oneness and otherness, bothness and not-bothness, existence and non-existence, eternity and non-eternity. . .

the things of this world are all a mental creation, since external phenomena are transient and only exist for us because of our perception. Consequently they are actually "created" by our mind (or, if you will, a more universal entity called Mind). Consequently they do not exist outside our mind and hence are a void. Yet the mind itself, which is the only thing real, is also a void since its thoughts cannot be located by the five senses.

God give me the strength to face a fact though it slay me.

My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.

A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.