Quotes About Reality

The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique.

Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.

Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them.

To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs—you need, actually—to keep them at one remove. How, then, to reassemble that montage of deceit into a truthful past?

After reading four pages of continuous ten-year-old dialogue magically recalled by someone who was in the throes of alcohol withdrawal at the time, I wondered how he did it. No I didn't. I knew he made it up. It was easy and defendable, really, sublimating and eliding the past in service of a larger Emotional Truth.

Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them. Was I faking it then, or am I faking it now? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?

You know, I've never actually really believed that death is inevitable. I just think it's a rumor.

I think that one should recognize reality even when one doesn't like it; indeed, especially when one doesn't like it.

Everything Dies. That is the law of life-the bitter unchangeable law

But life is not a legend or a story. Reality is far more precious than a story...

Dreams are illusions, and we can't let go of them because we would be dead.

We had to scrub our books and practices so that they reflected the reality of our underlying businesses. We also had to shake our executives out of their blinding fixation on quarterly results. Only then could we make planning decisions that supported long-term growth.

The accumulated research into quantum physics has begun to explain how the mind, or consciousness, has always played a major role in determining our particular experience of reality.

Do you remember when you found out you wouldn't live forever? People don't talk about this, but everybody had to go through it because you're not born with that knowledge.

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do; They confuse fantasy with reality.

But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, that we construct meanings where there are none.

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.

Reality is neurology, and is not absolute.

As an artist you look into yourself to understand the human potential to be all kinds of things that are not necessarily pleasant but are real - a criminal, a murderer, a sadist, a rapist; to be all of these things that many people are. You can't allow yourself to say, 'I'm a different species from those people.' Because you aren't.

For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.

It can't happen here" is number one on the list of famous last words.

I now understand that deja vu is the awareness of the simultaneous occurrence of a nearly identical event in an alternate universe as perceived by another version of yourself. That haunting sense of unreality and the flimsiness of time, of identity itself, is a window through which we glimpse another world.

Perfection' is man's ultimate illusion. It simply doesn't exist in the universe.... If you are a perfectionist, you are guaranteed to be a loser in whatever you do.

Absolutes do not exist in this universe. If you try to force your experiences into absolute categories, you will be constantly depressed because your perceptions will not conform to reality. You will set yourself up for discrediting yourself endlessly because whatever you do will never measure up to your exaggerated expectations. The technical name for this type of perceptual error is "dichotomous thinking." You see everything as black or white—shades of gray do not exist.