Quotes About Reality

Hell of a world we live in, huh? (...) But it could be worse, huh?" "That's right," I said, "or even worse, it could be perfect.

By definition, any belief is something that sombody hopes is true; conversely, a disbelief is a hope that something is not true. Neither has anything whatever to do with the real truth, except to obscure it.

Invisible things are the only realities; invisible things alone are the things that shall remain.

If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.

Who says life is fair, where is that written?

I'll tell you the truth and its up to you to live with it.

Dost thou fill thy chest with dirt, and expect to find gold when thou openest it?

Nobody is going to enjoy reading the contents of this book, but those who do read will be able to see things in their true perspective; they will be able to understand what is happening in the world today and why.

We have scarcely gotten home ... when our children's sneezes greet us, skinned knees bleed after waiting all day to do so. There is the bellyache and the burned-out basement bulb, the stalled car and the incontinent cat. The windows frost, the toilets sweat, the body of our spouse is one cold shoulder and the darkness of our bedroom is soon full of the fallen shadows of our failures.

But for high-tech products (and many others) promotions can't change reality.

So it's true: Being without Being is blue.

Here is history seen, endured, and created at the same time….. If you believe only that which you know to be true, you will trouble yourself with very little belief." On Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" in "Fifty Literary Pillars".

The purpose of an imaginative narrative isn't to confirm what we think we already know about reality; rather, it offers "a record of the choices, inadvertent or deliberate, the author has made from all the possibilities of language." A fictional cat may reflect qualities of a real cat, but it is better appreciated as a product of the author's agile mind.

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us. —William H. Gass, "Mr. Gaddis and His Goddamn Books" (2006)

Quantum physicist John Wheeler expressed it this way, when discussing the search for the clockwork mechanism that runs the world, "There may be no such thing as the 'glittering central mechanism of the universe' to be seen behind a glass wall at the end of the trail. Not machinery but magic may be the better description of the treasure that is waiting.

It took a long time to get past the wall my demand for objective reality erected, but eventually I learned how to surrender my quest for reality and simply enjoy the experience for itself. And, slowly, I began to realize that "reality" was quite different, and a whole lot weirder, than I'd ever imagined possible.

By convention sour, by convention sweet, by convention colored; in reality, nothing but Atoms and the Void.

In other words, atoms and elementary particles and matter itself all are probabilities and possibilities, to which we ourselves give form.

Does quantum physics really say, he asked, that the moon doesn't exist when no one is looking at it? He found the idea that matter was described by probabilities especially upsetting. "God does not play dice with the universe!" he declared. To which Bohr supposedly replied, "Albert, don't tell God what to do.

But there was one thing more about quantum physics that thoroughly annoyed most of the scientists who truly understood its implications. Because it dealt so intimately with the nature of matter—and reality—quantum physics also had quite a few things to say about things that, until recently, were strictly the preserve, not of physics, but of metaphysics . . . of religion, and—whisper it softly—of philosophy.11

The atoms or the elementary particles are not real," Heisenberg said. "They form a world of potentialities and possibilities rather than one of things or facts.