Quotes About Reality

Well, honey, everybody has to die sometime.

Ths visions of the mind have a debt to reality that it is hard to get the mind to pay when it is under the influence of its visions.

But whatever you hope, you will find out that you can't bargain with your life on your own terms. It is always going to be proving itself worse or better than you hoped.

He was all show, and he had the conviction, as such people do, that show is the same as substance. He didn't think he was fooling other people; he had fooled himself. He thought he saw what he thought we saw.

The only time Tol's clothes looked good was before he put them on.

We live the given life, and not the planned. - 1994 III

Most people now are looking for a 'better place,' which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no 'better place' than this, not in this world.

We haven't accepted—we can't really believe—that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so.

This is the real power of joy, to make us certain that, beneath all grief, the most fundamental of realities is joy itself.

As Plato said, all poets are liars. This does not mean we should mistrust them.

The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination.

In reality, of course, when it comes to choosing a spouse the vast majority of people have been always content to accept flawed reality over mythical perfection. But not Thomas Day. Nobody—before or since—has tried quite so literally or so systematically to create for themselves their vision of a perfect mate

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato . In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.

T]he atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.

The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding'.

The probability wave] meant a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version of the old concept of potentia in Aristoelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.

We can never know anything.

The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man.

Most details are factually correct; some are not. What was important to the author was something other than accuracy, some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered the protagonist of this story.

Only if this were a film would I consider it real.

But in the end, he's just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant.