Quotes About Reality

My vague confused dreams became a reality and the reality became an oppressive, difficult, joyless life. All remained the same. Once it seemed so plain and right that to live for others was happiness; now it has become unintelligible. Why live for others, when life had no attraction even for oneself?

And it's true that I lost my life here, over this curtain, as if I was storming a fortress. Can it be? How terrible and how stupid! It can't be! Can't be, but is.

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

War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous. The military calling is the most highly honored.

Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

Ali ljudi – veliki, odrasli ljudi – nisu prestajali da varaju i mu?e sami sebe i jedan drugoga. Ljudi su držali da nije sveto i važno to proljetno jutro, ni ta krasota svijeta božjega stvorena za dobro svim bi?ima – krasota koja pozivlje za mir, slogu i ljubav – nego je sveto i važno ono što su izmislili oni sami da bi vladali jedan nad drugim

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.

She was, every time she saw him, making the picture of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, impossible in reality) fit with him as he really was

Her clothes, her figure, the expression of her face, the sound of her voice--all these said to him: 'Not the real thing. Everything you lived by and still live by is a lie, a deception that blinds you from the reality of life and death.

Lying on his back, he gazed up now into the high, cloudless sky. "Do I not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a round arch? But, however I screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot see it not round and not bounded, and in spite of my knowing about infinite space, I am incontestably right when I see a solid blue dome, and more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it.

The one thing necessary in life, as in art is to tell the truth.

Each believed that the life he himself led was the only real life and the life led by his friend was nothing but an illusion.

Well, what of it? I've not given up thinking of death. It's true that it's high time I was dead; and that all this is nonsense. It's the truth I'm telling you. I do value my idea and my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great - ideas, work - it's all dust and ashes.

These stupid chignons! There's no getting at the real daughter. One simply strokes the bristles of dead women.

But the more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it was indubitably so, that in reality, looking upon life, he had forgotten one little fact—that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was even worth beginning, and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes, it was awful, but it was so.

I endeavor to recall the happy comforting dreams interrupted by my returning to consciousness of reality, but to my astonishment so soon as I recapture the thread of my former reverie I find it impossible to go on with it and, most astonishing of all, my imaginings no longer afford me any pleasure.

satu-satunya yang wajib-dalam hidup dan seni-adalah menyatakan kebenaran

I do value my idea and my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great—ideas, work—it's all dust and ashes.

At the point where he, today's Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting. And the further he was from childhood, the nearer he got to the present day, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures appeared.

All that people sincerely believe in must be true; it may be differently expressed but it cannot be a lie, and therefore if it presents itself to me as a lie, that only means that I have not understood it.

War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous.

Life is a dream, death is an awakening.

Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself.

Time is an illusion of life; the life of the past and the future clouds men from the true life of the present.