Quotes About Reality

It occurred to him that what he had taken for a perfect impossibility—that he had not lived his life as one should—might in fact be the truth. It occurred to him that those scarcely detected impulses to struggle against what the people of highest social rank considered good, those feeble tendencies that he barely noticed and immediately suppressed, might in fact be what was real, and everything else what was false.

It seemed to each of them that the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend was a mere phantasm.

At the fact that I'm unable to think up a situation in which life would not be suffering, that we're all created in order to suffer, and that we all know it and keep thinking up ways of deceiving ourselves. But if you see the truth, what can you do?

on which side is truth,—on the side of the thoughts which seem true and well-founded, or on the side of the lives of others and myself?

En que estaba pensando? Si, en mi vida; como sea que me la represente no puede ser sino dolor. Todos estamos llamados a sufrir, lo sabemos y queremos disimularlo de alguna manera. Pero cuando nos clava sus ojos la verdad, ¿Que nos queda por hacer?

And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had then seemed – none of them except the first recollections of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something really pleasant with which it would be possible to live if it could return. But the child who had experienced that happiness existed no longer, it was like a reminiscence of somebody else.

Tudo aquilo de que viveste e de que vives é uma mentira, um embuste, que oculta de ti a vida e a morte

And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue degenerates, and so on, will be as right and as wrong as the child who stands underneath and says that the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.

Why does everything exist that exists, and why do I exist?" "Because it exists.

É possível ofender uma pessoa honrada e uma mulher honrada, mas dizer a um ladrão que é um ladrão é apenas la constatation d'un fait.

War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that, and not play at war.

He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected.

German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth—science—which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.

How is it possible to reconcile the sense that the universe in which we have been cast has a significance when we are so aware of the jumbled trivia of day-to-day living? How is

Bütün kad?nlar erkeklerden daha maddecidir. Biz a?ktan muazzam bir ?ey yapar?z, onlarsa her zaman terre-a-terre.

The time for fooling himself was over: something new and dreadful was going on inside Ivan Ilyich, something significant, more significant than anything in his whole life. And he was the only one who knew it; the people around him didn't know, or didn't want to know-they thought that everything in the world was going on as before. This was what tormented Ivan Ilyich more than anything.

the assertion that you live in a lie while I live in the truth is the most cruel thing one person can say to another...

long. I cannot now help seeing day and night going round and bringing me to death. That is all I see, for that alone is true. All else is false.

your consciousness of existence is derived from the conjunction of all your sensations, that that consciousness of existence is the result of your sensations.

assuming there are no sensations, it follows that there is no idea of existence.

If there were no magnanimity in war, we'd go to it only when it was worth going to certain death, as now. . . . We must take this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. That's the whole point: to cast off the lie, and if it's war it's war, and not a game.

the true life is outside time; it is in the present

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.

What can one do?' " Stepan Oblonsky says early on in the book. " 'The world's made like that.' " Part of the way this world was made is that wives get older faster than their husbands.