Quotes About Reality

By the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the 'real world.' So I started working for newspapers.

I get the urge people will have after Trump. 'Look at the chaos and the exhaustion: Wouldn't it be better to go back to something more stable with somebody we know?' But there's no going back to a pre-Trump universe. We can't be saying the system will be fine again just like it was. Because that's not true; it wasn't fine.

Tackling malaria in a country like the Central African Republic is a huge uphill battle, and my experiences there have been a healthy dose of reality, fueling my own sense of urgency to do my part in reducing the preventable suffering of the incredible women I met.

I think one of the bigger issues with modern-day people is that we don't give enough credit to people from history as being real. We almost treat them as these rarified beings that didn't exist the way that we do with emotions and urges and drives.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

Remember, we see the world not as it is but as we are. Most of us see through the eyes of our fears and our limiting beliefs and our false assumptions.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

I've sort of closed my mind off to reality shows: I just don't watch them, don't care about them, don't know who the characters are, but they're all in general usage.

I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.

The truly unique trait of 'Sapiens' is our ability to create and believe fiction. All other animals use their communication system to describe reality. We use our communication system to create new realities. Of course, not all fictions are shared by all humans, but at least one has become universal in our world, and this is money.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It sometimes causes us difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it, nonetheless.

Things do not always happen the way I would like them to happen, and I had better get used to that.

In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media validate reality. If you don't believe this, just think how many times you've described some real event as being 'just like a movie.'

I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.

They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.

I used to be an optimist, but now I know that nothing is going to turn out as I expect.

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

I guess I found it useful to realise that everything is true at once, you know? You can pull back and say, 'Everything will be fine,' but you can also be in a situation and say, 'Not everything is going to be fine.'

When we human beings hypothesize that a law of nature holds - even temporarily or situationally - we are creating an idea, but we are also making a hypothesis about how nature behaves, whose truth or usefulness has nothing to do with what we know or believe.

Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

I think we were all initially swept along with the Obama win, but he's proven to be simply a set of teeth, and useless in every other regard.