Quotes About Reality

But stories, even very nasty ones, are traditionally considered more satisfying than reality—which, as we all know, is a grossly overrated affair.

Whether you think consciousness to be a benefit or a horror, this is only what you think—and nothing else. But even though you cannot demonstrate the truth of what you think, you can at least put it on show and see what the audience thinks.

Question: How could we know we were keeping certain truths from ourselves regarding how things truly are in this world at its deepest level? Answer: Because we have done it before.

The pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real.

the finale is always the same: simple heart failure. And all the time you thought that life was so complex.

Who knows how many others there were who might say that their existence consisted of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense, a nonsense that had nothing unique about it at all and that had nothing behind it or beyond it except more and more nonsense—a new order of nonsense, perhaps an utterly unknown nonsense, but all of it nonsense and nothing but nonsense.

Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that is, in fact, real.

What was that all about!' (In this sense the world of the company mirrored the world itself, which sometimes managed to stage a rousing first act, and perhaps even provide a few engaging scenes of a second before devolving into a playwright's nightmare, wherein the actors either butchered their lines or entirely forgot them, scenery collapsed, props misfired, and most of the audience left the theater during intermission.)

Life is a nightmare that leaves it's mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.

Existence equals nightmare." Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure.

All supernatural horror depends on a confusion of what we believe should be and should not be. As scientists, philosophers, and spiritual figures have attested, our heads are full of illusions; things, including human things, are frequently not what they seem…No one can prove that our existence is a paradox and a horror. Everything is alright with the world.

If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.

Devils are not so black as they are painted.

The look of the world's a lie, a face made up O'er graves and fiery depths, and nothing's true But what is horrible. If man could see The perils and diseases that he elbows Each day he walks a mile, which catch at him, Which fall behind and graze him as he passes, Then would he know that life's a single pilgrim Fighting unarmed among a thousand soldiers

In any case, muffins that are only imaginary aren't liable to get stuck.

The voters lack the information—or the interest—to develop a coherent view of politics beyond a general party identification, and this reality plays itself out regularly in U.S. elections.

A society that is post-factual is pre-fascist.

causing him to consider the possibility that there really was no such thing as happiness or unhappiness. Maybe there was only intensity-and then everything else.

I think it will be found that experience, the true source and foundation of all knowledge, invariably confirms its truth.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our "reality tunnel.

As modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past.

Consciousness is a large-scale, unified phenomenon emerging from a myriad of physical micro-events. As long as a sufficiently high degree of internal correlation and causal coupling allows this island of dancing micro-events in your brain to emerge, you live in a single reality. A single, unified world appears to you.

there are innumerable things in life you can fathom only by experiencing them, that there is a depth in pure perception that cannot be grasped or invaded by thought or language.