Quotes About Reality

Do I care about these other branches? Should I? There is always the chance that at some time in the future an empty branch recombines with my branch, causing interference, which changes my life

But were we mere atoms, interference between full and empty branches of the wave function would be happening all the time.

We have to find a way to unfreeze time-to represent time without turning it into space. I have no idea how to do this. I can't conceive of a mathematics that doesn't represent a world as if it were frozen in eternity. It's terribly hard to represent time, and that's why there's a good chance that this representation is the missing piece.

We seem to experience time passing as a smooth flow of moments. Barbour insists that the passage of time is an illusion and that reality consists of nothing but a vast pile of moments, each a configuration of the whole universe. You now are experiencing a moment. Now you are experiencing a different moment. According to Barbour, both moments exist eternally and timelessly, in the pile of moments. Reality is nothing but this frozen collection of moments outside time.

Quantum mechanics has to be expanded, to allow for many different descriptions, depending on who the observer is.

My people, my people, what can I say; say what I can. I saw it but didn't believe it; I didn't believe what I saw. Are we gonna live together? Together are we gonna live?

This is it. This is what it really means. This is what it is all about.

Wishful thinking doesn't change reality.

The so-called Real World. Human misery and sadness. Blind politics and general cruelty.

No real ghosts, Ted told himself. Memories were the only ghosts adults had: Memories and regrets.

Maybe there weren't fairytales, or dreams didn't often really come true, but this moment felt very close. As close as it gets to perfect in an imperfect world.

Of course a carp is just a carp, waiting to become either your pet, or a gefilte fish. But am I wrong to also see this body lying in a pool of blood, being fibbed about in plain sight, as a metaphor for all the corpses and blood never discussed?

There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible.

Everything that is possible demands to exist.

Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.

A good story is at its best when the line between truth and fiction remains ambiguous.

Every story is true and a lie. The true part of this one is: Love and the memory of love can't be drowned. The lie part is that this is a good thing.

For one timeless ghastly interval he thought he saw the fabric of the ship itself dissolving with him into a mist of discrete particles, he knew that he wasn't human anymore and nothing was real. And then plunged headlong into nothingness.

There are two worlds: the world we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination.

Kelsko was a toad. But he was proud. Kelsko was a pathological liar, but he was not a sucker for the lies of others, the way most liars were, for he had not lost the ability to perceive the difference between truth and falsehood. He simply had no respect for that difference.

The entire world wasn't after them. It only seemed that way.

Philosophy, like science, consists of theories or insights arrived at as a result of systemic reflection or reasoning in regard to the data of experience. It involves, therefore, the analysis of experience and the synthesis of the results of analysis into a comprehensive or unitary conception. Philosophy seeks a totality and harmony of reasoned insight into the nature and meaning of all the principal aspects of reality.

Metaphysics is the clearing house for all fundamental philosophical problems.