Quotes About Reality

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one.

She [Anna] was doing what she always did when she saw him [Vronsky]—comparing the image of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, and impossible in reality) with him as he was.

Acting is a form of deception, and actors can mesmerize themselves almost as easily as an audience.

Contemplava-o por todo o tempo que não vira, impaciente como sempre de verificar a imagem que dele fizera durante a ausência. E, como sempre, a imaginação superava a realidade.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?

Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?

False. Everything by which you have lived and live now is all a deception, a lie, concealing both life and death from you.

History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true.

Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.

We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?

I'll tell you truly: I value my thought and work terribly, but in essence - think about it - this whole world of ours is just a bit of mildew that grew over a tiny planet. And we think we can have something great - thoughts, deeds! They're all grains of sand

What tormented Ivan Ilych most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and that he only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.

He is not apprehended by reason, but by life.

sometimes life is a whole lot more interesting inside my head than it is on the outside.

Mila punched me in the arm. Don't get goofy on me, Jigsaw! Ghosts are not real. And they don't write books! I'll say this for Mila. She's got a pretty good right hand. My arm ached for the rest of the day.

Why should you expect everything to work out successful? You're old enough to know better.

Don't you believe in death?" I yelled at him. "No," he answers, "and I don't believe in time either...

After all, you have grown accustomed to having an authority in your life to define reality, and without that external direction you feel confused and lost.

In a world where the people are numbed and distracted, the only thing that sells is the unbelievable.

With that, everything was suddenly thrown into greater relief, a kind of super three-dimensionality that enhanced the presence and realness of everything in my perceptual field, from the small insects close to my face all the way to the galaxy of stars behind the moon. I was looking at everything from the larger perspective of the entire Universe.