Quotes About Reality

People believe what they want to believe. The truth rarely makes a difference.

You have lived too long in the forest, Laitha; you do not understand the world. Men like to think they control it but this is nonsense. Women rule, as they always have. They tell a man he is god-like. The man believes them and is in their thrall. For without them to tell him, he becomes merely a man.

As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish he'd go away! —HUGHES MEARNS The Psychoed

I'm the only person who exists in my world—but isn't it that way for all of us?

It was all supposed to be reassuring-but it wasn't. Not really.

Voter NOUN a paranoid schizophrenic who believes the voices promising them an alternate future are real.

People appeared enormously foolish to him. He understood that they were only animated cavities full of jelly and strings and liquids.

You've been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you're someone else. Your you is just a fragile fabrication. Every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy.

at the same time he knew that most elderly people were not wise at all but only wore a thin veneer of cheap wisdom as a sort of armor against the world.

The Army isn't what it used to be," I lamented to General Cushman one day. "It never was," he replied.

the world was created this morning. No such thing as the past …

Tonight, I've finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy.

Gallimard: You have to do what I say! I'm conjuring you up in my mind! Song: Rene, I've never done what you've said. Why should it be any different in your mind?

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient unto the moment is the appearance of reality

Absence is all existence seen as one undifferentiated tissue (reality, as we have seen, prior to our names), while Presence is that same tissue seen in its differentiated forms, the ten thousand things (reality differentiated by our names). And it should also be emphasized that both terms, Absence and Presence, are primarily verbal in Chinese: hence, that tissue of reality is seen as verbal, rather than the static nominal: a tissue that is alive and in motion.

It was what I believed to be the humanity of the Marxist idea that made me what I was then; it is the inhumanity of what I have seen to be the Marxist reality that has made me what I am now.

The next two essays, "My Vietnam Lessons" and "Semper Fidel," belong to this genre, and are attempts I made to confront our radical cohort with the harsh realities of what we had actually done. Vietnam was the defining issue of our generation but the events that unfolded proved that those of us who were active in the anti-war movement had been wrong on every critical point, and that our actions had tragic consequences for the people we claimed to be defending.

Idealism kills," the philosopher Nietzsche had warned

It is the human wish to be told lies that keeps us where we are.

The lower our self-esteem in general—and how much the uncomfortable truth affects our self-image in particular—the more fearful we become.

We think we are in the land of the living going to the land of the dying. But really we are in the land of the dying, going to the land of the living.

Kids grow up hearing fairy tales, but the biggest fairy tale of all, I realized at the age of four, is that life is safe. Life isn't safe, I learned. It's crazy. Evil is real. One minute you could be riding your bike on the way to get candy, and the next, you're dead. Anything could happen anywhere at any time. So now what? How was I supposed to live without giving in to the fear?

All myths originate with truth, sometimes it is to raise the influence of a religion by pacifying fears. Sometimes the reality is far more frightening.

The trouble with alcohol is that it makes you feel young and look old.