Quotes About Reality

When the doctor was there, Alfred refused to believe that he'd had a stroke. "I can't have had a stroke," he grated, in a terrible rage, "I've got 93,000 pounds in my current account."

All my life I have felt myself to be on the edge of things. All my life I have suffered from bad dreams. All my life I have had difficulty in knowing whether I am awake or in a nightmare.

Invariably, identical facts provoke starkly different interpretations.

In her fantasy, the unknown actress cast herself as a celebrity coping with the chore of recognition and being pestered for photos.117 In reality, little had changed since she left school.

as R. D. Laing showed in his landmark work on schizophrenia, some people lack this basic security and attempt to replace the vacuum with false selves. Most of the time we take it for granted, but it is only when it is lost that we can fully appreciate our brain's ability to create the feeling of selfpossession, or be comfortable with who we are.

Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran's work with phantom limbs seems to confirm the brain's remarkable ability to create a sense of cognitive unity even if the reality (of many selves, and of many layers of consciousness) is more complex.

In Psychological Types, Jung suggested two contrasting ways in which people saw the world. Some people can appreciate reality only through their five senses ("sensing" types), while others wait for internal confirmation of what is true or real, relying on their unconscious. These

People who use the sensing mode are engrossed in what is around them, look only for facts, and find it less interesting to deal with ideas or abstractions. Intuitive people like to dwell in the unseen world of ideas and possibilities, distrustful of physical reality. Whatever

The literal is always abstract ? because reality is so much more than we can ever know or experience or imagine.

The symbol is not an artificially constructed sign: it flowers in the soul spontaneously to announce something that cannot be expressed otherwise. It is the unique expression of the thing symbolized as of a reality that thus becomes transparent to the soul, but which itself transcends all expression.

Events, or acts of understanding, are the actions of a subject expressed as a verb, the reality of which derives from the person who conjugates it.3 For

Nothing is as real as a dream. Responsibilities need not erase it. Duties need not obscure it. Because the dream is within you, no one can take it away.

Perception and reality are two different things.

There is a strange thing about anticipation," Fionchadd told him. "It is generally both more and less than the actuality that follows. A thing desired is rarely as pleasant to possess as it is to anticipate; a thing dreaded is rarely so foul.

In order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder. If you have busy managers working under you, they are an indictment of your vision and your capacity to transform that vision into reality. Cut them some slack.

Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur.

I've been in Iraq, and it never occurred to me to go, 'Hey, this war is bogus,' to some guy who's 24 hours a day trying not to get shot at or blown up.

The whole idea of doing the Hollywood thing never even occurred to me. When you grow up on the East coast, Hollywood seems like this fantasy land and you don't think that people can actually make a living there.

Most of the things in 'The Things They Carried' didn't happen to me. Ninety-five percent of it's invented. It's not what occurred.

A lot of people are living in a dream world - they want to deny that aging occurs or believe it doesn't have to occur. They'll hold on to this belief until the moment they die. The reality will eventually hit them.

Doubting what you see is a very odd experience. And doubting what you remember is a little less odd than doubting what you see. But it's also a pretty odd experience, because some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them, and that happens to be the case even for memories that are not true.

Acting is an imaginative exercise. It would be odd if you didn't try to identify with the roles you play, but I think I can differentiate between where my imagination is leading me and where I actually am.

The pressure of TV can force people to do odd things.

Getting all dressed up and putting on fancy clothes - all of that's a great thing, but oddly, it doesn't really have a lot to do with acting most of the time.