Quotes About Reality

What we use to construct the past is...a hodgepodge of fleeting glimpses...a construct of what stands in the light and what I imagine in the dark where I cannot see.

I know from my studies and from my life is that there is no such thing as a true event. We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed. Take

Death is no surprise to an old man like me. Being able to take a regular crap, now, there is a surprise.

Because they believe a thing does not make it so. There is no dignity in anger. But

It was as if the thing that was N'Kari was merely a finger-puppet on the end of a claw that had been poked through the walls of reality by some much greater being.

We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know.

It was a limitation of human consciousness: We live only in the future and past, we cannot perceive now. Now occupies no space, a hypothetical gap between future and past. Only an exceptional few could feel now athletes and jazzmen and, yes, thieves...

You can cheat with a picture. You can fall in love with an image of someone, with a memory or an idea of her. For that matter, the matter is generally easier to love than the actual person, since the image will never change, never grow old, never argue or disappoint you.

But then, we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves. The money man tells himself that by getting rich he is actually enriching others, the artist tells himself that his creations are things of deathless beauty, the soldier tells himself he is on the side of the angels. Me, I told myself that in court I could make things turn out right—that when I won, justice was served. You can get drunk on such thinking, and in Jacob's case I was.

If God does not exist, our lives are ultimately meaningless, valueless, and purposeless despite how desperately we cling to the illusion to the contrary.

The point is this: if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends that life has meaning.

Something is objective if it is independent of people's opinions. If it holds or is true independently of what anybody thinks then it is objective. It is subjective if it is dependent upon people's opinions.

Adopting the multiverse hypothesis to explain our ordered observations would thus result once more in a strange sort of illusionism.

You don't want to hear what I have to say. You only want me to say what you want to hear. But trust me when I tell you that you won't ever get all you want. You'll just grow frustrated and bitter, and you'll end up doing things that will kill the best part of you.

For what was hope but a liar, preoccupied with the droughts of the past and the harvests of the future while it killed off the present with its bland blandishments?

He saw clearly the futility of trying to leave a mark on the shifting planes of reality, like trying to write his name in the foam of an ocean wave.

But isn't it better to know the truth, no matter how vile?" He lifted up his head and cackled. "Whoever told you such nonsense? One kind lie is worth a thousand truths.

There are truths, I know with all certainty, that I will never grasp, but that doesn't make them any less true.

There is no standing still, Life goes on, and is always bringing forth its Realities, which Way soever it goeth.

Life is not fair...Anyone who says it is, or even that it ought to be, is a fool or worse.

It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit

There are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa.

Theatre,' Davy said. 'That's what houses are, you know. Just theatre. All buildings are. Charades of permanence. They're fantasies. Fictions we make about ourselves. Right?

This is where the disillusioned gathered to look for new illusions