Quotes About Reality

Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction.

How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck-- people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell's death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways.

How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?

Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor? The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment.

What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious.

But if there's nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all.

Just because Jimmy Swaggart believes in God doesn't mean that God does not exist.

For him there is no present; there is only the past of what has been formulated and seen and the future of what has been formulated and not seen. The present is surrendered to the past and the future.

A thought is a substance, producing the thing that is imagined by the thought.

I don't begrudge the kids their hormones or their illusions of immortality.

I'd expected her house to have a phosphorescent, lava-light atmosphere, but she had mother-of-pearl Formica and café curtains with pom-poms. A little girl with rashy cheeks and big eyebrows like Nadine's sat in a playpen by the stove, chewing on an empty Saltines box.

Life is messy, violent, confusing, and hopeful.

That melting pot stuff was always more about what this country wanted to believe about itself than the way people really felt.

The real war will never get in the books.

I cannot be awake, for nothing looks to me as it did before, or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.

I believe that much unseen is also here.

Song of Myself I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

I have heard what the talkers were talking . . . . the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now; And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams, I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands, Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you, Your true soul and body appear before me, They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work, farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying. -from To You

I accept Reality and dare not question it, Materialism first and last imbuing.

I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can. -from As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life

Here is the test of wisdom, Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.