Quotes About Reality

It is always futile to restore normality; "normality" is only the reality of yesterday. The job is not to impose yesterday's normal on a changed today; but to change the business, its behaviors, its attitudes, its expectations – as well as its products, its markets, and its distributive channels – to fit the new realities

The incongruity between perceived and actual reality typically characterizes a whole industry or a whole service area. The solution, however, should again be small and simple, focused and highly specific.

Behind the incongruity between actual and perceived reality, there always lies an element of intellectual arrogance, of intellectual rigour and dogmatism. 'It is I, not they, who know what poor people can afford', the Japanese industrialist in effect asserted. 'People behave according to economic rationality, as every good Marxist knows,' as Khrushchev implied. This explains why the incongruity is so easily exploited by innovators: they are left alone and undisturbed.

Executives of necessity live and work within an organization. Unless they make conscious efforts to perceive the outside, the inside may blind them to the true reality.

Executives may become blind to everything that is perception (i.e., event) rather than fact (i.e., after the event).

When a change in perception takes place, the facts do not change. Their meaning does.

millions of people "deeply believed things that were verifiably untrue.

In the course of these pages, I have called the idea of the mysterious woman a cliché, and so it was. But, like other clichés, it has a certain psychological reality.

The human mind hungers for reality; except for the largely encapsulated id, which is the depository of the raw drives and of deeply repressed material, the other institutions of the mind, the ego and the superego, draw continuously and liberally on the culture in which they subsist, develop, succeed, and fail. While the mind presents the world with its needs, the world gives the mind its grammar, wishes their vocabulary, anxieties their object.

Both as unique event and as linked to others, an experience is thus more than a naked wish or a casual perception; it is an organization of passionate demands, persistent ways of seeing, and objective realities that will not be denied.

Reliable senses shared across all normal humans can be expected to deliver consensus. But it is also possible that we could have wide agreement without reliability; we might all be deluded in the same way. Some philosophers have thought that color vision is like this. Colors are not really out there in the world, even if we all experience them that way.

And then I realize that maybe not so much has changed as we all thought, that maybe the whole idea of progress is a paradox, a rocking horse that goes forward and back, forward and back, but stays in the same place, giving only the comforting illusion of motion.

I no longer understand anything literally. I cannot wait until I wake up, whereas earlier I could not wait to fall asleep. I have been made to speak. I have been sentenced to reality. - Do you hear it? (Silence.) Can you hear? (Silence.) Psst. (Silence.)

A bad dream. You were having a bad dream. Oh, I say. Is that what I'm having?

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself," according to Anaïs Nin (herself the author of several abortions). But what if it's not a lie? And what if the someone is you?

If God is the Creator of all things and evil is a thing, then God is the Creator of evil and He is to be blamed for its existence. No, evil is not a thing but a wrong choice, or the damage done by a wrong choice. Evil is no more a positive thing than blindness is, but it is just as real.

Feelings, like waves, look more substantial than they are.

It is tempting to remain in the comfortable theater of the imagination instead of the real world, to fall in love with the idea of becoming a saint and loving God and neighbor instead of doing the actual work, because the idea makes no demands on you.

I often thought of comparing life to a dream, because death always seemed to be an awakening.

Right Response to Reality—the Three R's—is the fundamental principle of morality, of sanctity, and of sanity.

The ultimate reason we must become holy is that that is the only way to become real.

The only honest reason for anyone ever to believe anything is that it is true, that it is really there.

It's the same world as ours but also a different world because no two people see it in exactly the same way.

From Socrates through Aquinas, reason meant primarily the understanding of the nature of reality, the knowledge of the essences of things.