Quotes About Reality

But actuality in the end proves unmanageable. It breaks in upon men's conceptions, changes them, and finally destroys them. Even where men's conceptions are sound and reasonable, where by their own creative power and their discernment of actuality they correspond to things, actuality in its capacity as Luck, will behave in an unreasonable way, as Pericles says, and overturn conceptions of the greatest nobility and intelligence.

Reading about Shelley and Byron I get awfully fed up, realizing that these men never did a day's work in their lives; they lived off the system, were free to travel all around Europe with entourages if necessary, never wrote about a guy earning a living. That is not the world I knew, that is not the world I want to be a part of, and by and large it's not a world I'm interested in. How

The story is not about someone else. It is not even about you. It is you. The one who "lives" in the dream is the one who dreams. Just as the dream softly pulses beneath everyday waking-noticeable only when the din and clatter of daytime is stilled by sleep-so the one who remembers a dream brings a new facet to waking.

Religion is a more or less organized way of remembering that every ministry points to a higher reality.

But it is to say that a basic idea of a representative democracy—one that argues over fundamental choices of policy, through the battle between differently committed representatives—is not the reality of our democracy anymore. We've settled into what Francis Fukuyama calls a "vetocracy," where change of almost any kind, whether from the Right or the Left, is practically always stopped.

I have just bought into the delusion that these toys are real. And now I'm believing that this one toy, Buzz Lightyear, is himself delusional for not realizing he is just a toy. This was insane.

If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge. A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.

Reality doesn't owe us comfort.

The real thing that physics tell us about the universe is that it's big, rare event happens all the time — including life — and that doesn't mean it's special.

A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.

Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake.

If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.

Yet how ordinary so many strange things turn out to be, like dreams that end up disappointing us by making sense.

A painting did not have to be beautiful; it had to be true. Then it was beautiful.

It is not often that you see life and fiction take each other by the hand and dance.

They can see everything they want to, but never forget that they cannot see beyond the distortion of their imagination where there is no color and everything exists in black and white. And that is why we will survive, because they do not have what is necessary to defeat us. The real war is between our imagination and theirs, what we can see and what they are blinded to. Do not despair. None of them can see far enough, and so long as we do not let them violate our imagination we will survive.

There is no comfort looking forth nor back, The present gives the lie to all her past.

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck.

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous.

I use the furniture of espionage to amuse the reader, to make the reader listen to me, because most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage. I think what gives my works whatever universality they have is that they use the metaphysical secret world to describe some realities of the overt world.

No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.

While we read a novel, we are insane--bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.