Quotes About Reality

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

Hope is a duty. Hope is our reality. Shelley says so and he believes it so, but for me the light has gone out. The light inside and the light outside. I have no lantern and no lighthouse. I am at sea in waves too high and the rocks wreck me.

What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events? How much of recollection is invention? Whose invention?

People will believe anything. Except, it seems, the truth.

People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much.

Shakespeare," he thought as he scribbled away. "Foolish fancy. This is life as it is lived.

Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. "I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind.

I could see in her a piece of the bright hope I once had in myself and it made me sour and angry. It made me feel sorry for her too. I wanted to take both her hands in mine, look her in the eye, and let her see that the world isn't interested in a little black girl's dreams.

Raccontami una storia, Pew. Che storia, piccola? Una a lieto fine? Non ne troverai una in tutto il mondo. Nessun lieto fine, dunque? Nessuna fine.

She was an absolutist, and had no time for people who thought cows didn't exist unless you looked at them. Once a thing was created, it was valid for all time. Its value went not up nor down.

It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.

People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you choose between the two realities. There is so much pain here.

This has been my difficulty. The difficulty with my life. Those well-built trig points, those physical determinants of parents, background, school, family, birth, marriage, death, love, work, are themselves as much in motion as I am. What should be stable, shifts. What I am told is solid, slips. The sensible strong ordinary world of fixity is folklore. The earth is not flat. Geometry cedes to algebra. The Greeks were wrong.

Some folk say I'm a fool, but there's more to this world than meets the eye.' I waited quietly. 'There's this world,' she banged the wall graphically, 'and there's this world,' she thumped her chest. 'If you want to make sense of either, you have to take notice of both.

The real world has its limits; the imaginary world is infinite. Unable to enlarge the one, let us restrict the other, for it is from the difference between the two alone that are born all the pains which make us truly unhappy.

It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires, and who can doubt that the interest we have in admitting or denying the reality of the Judgement to come determines the faith of most men in accordance with their hopes and fears.

My love for imaginary objects and my facility in lending myself to them ended by disillusioning me with everything around me, and determined that love of solitude which I have retained ever since that time.

As long as we desire, we can do without happiness: we expect to achieve it. If happiness fails to come, hope persists, and the charm of illusion lasts as long as the passion that causes it. So this condition is sufficient in itself, and the anxiety it inflicts is a sort of enjoyment that compensates for reality… Woe to him who has nothing left to desire… We enjoy less what we obtain than what we hope for, and we are happy only before being happy.

The truth brings no man a fortune

Es singular que nunca se remonte más agradablemente mi imaginación como cuando me hallo en un estado menos agradable; y, al contrario, cuando todo ríe en derredor mío, entonces es menos risueña mi fantasía. Mi mala cabeza no puede sujetarse a la realidad. No puede embellecer, necesita crear.

No one cares for reality, everyone stakes his essence on illusion. Slaves and dupes of their self-love, men live not in order to live but to make other believe they have lived!

Les hommes ne sont naturellement ni rois, ni grands, ni courtisans, ni riches ; tous sont nés nus et pauvres, tous sujets aux misères de la vie, aux chagrins, aux maux, aux besoins, aux douleurs de toute espèce ; enfin, tous sont condamnés à la mort. Voilà ce qui est vraiment de l'homme ; voilà de quoi nul mortel n'est exempt. Commencez donc par étudier de la nature humaine ce qui en est le plus inséparable, ce qui constitue le mieux l'humanité.

It was requisite for men to be thought what they really were not. To be and to appear became two very different things, and from this distinction sprang pomp and knavery, and all the vices which form their train.

Niemand kümmert sich mehr um die Wirklichkeit; alle setzen ihr Wesen in den Schein. Als Sklaven und Narren ihrer Eigenliebe leben sie dahin, nicht um zu leben, sondern um andere glauben zu machen, sie hätten gelebt.