Quotes About Reality

Al-Tabari understood that human truth is always flawed—that realities are multiple and that everyone has some degree of bias. The closest one might come to objectivity would be in the aggregate, which is why he so often concludes a disputed episode with that time-honored phrase "Only God knows for sure.

Caves have carried strong symbolic resonance for as long as there has been sacred legend. It might be tempting to say that it began with Plato's "allegory of the cave" in The Republic, which explores the interplay between shadows and reality (or in contemporary terms, perhaps, between virtual and actual reality).

Muhammad's is one of those rare lives that is more dramatic in reality than in legend. In fact the less one invokes the miraculous, the more extraordinary his life becomes. What emerges is something grander precisely because it is human, to the extent that his actual life reveals itself worthy of the word 'legendary'.

But there are times, I would argue, when fiction delivers the greater truth.

The middle of life has these cul-de-sac days. In your twenties you think, Surely I am going somewhere, and later--as in now--you think, Nope.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

Don't expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.

at that time she had not yet seen that the horizon was an illusion and

Even when ignored or denied, truth is the ultimate reference point.

The edges of my world are sharp, and they cut.

Truth has nutritional value.

If there is one thing the psychic taught me, it's that people and events are rarely who and what we think they are. They are more meaningful, more worth our attention-part of some finely choreographed, eternal dance that we would be wise to bow down before in gratitude and humility.

No one cares about the art of the lie at this point. They insist on impressing with the truth. See me! Look at me! Look at who I am! Look at who I want you to think I am!

That's the problem with revealing true truths. They make people uncomfortable. The truth should be grand and exotic, but mostly it isn't. Mostly it's uncomfortable.

What is the separation between information and the unfolding of phenomena?

The unfolding of phenomena is dependent on ignorance.

Experience itself is convention and we are outside of experience.

There is no relation between using the mind — as one does, in repairing shoes, and seeing it.

An event is not in the person.

The line between reality and illusion is getting blurry. Sometimes I really do think everyone hates me. Sometimes the crazy is all I've got. My head's pounding again. I hate all this: the pathology and the defiance and the confusion about whether I'm getting better or worse. And yet it is so totally me. I know that none of it ends here tonight. Not by a long shot.

No good story is quite true.

It is not your husband's lies that will do the most damage to you. It's the lies you tell yourself.

If the relativist claims that, since all reasoning is embodied in a particular social context, no claim to know the truth can be sustained, one has to ask for the basis on which this claim is made. It is, after all, a claim to know something about reality — namely that reality is unknowable.

The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about "what is true for me" is an evasion of the serious business of living.