Quotes About Reality

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.

To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher "reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.

He had seen the insides of jaggedly ripped-open dead people. He knew, for instance, what brains looked like spilling out of somebody's head. In the context of this, much of what went on in normal life seemed wholly and disturbingly ridiculous.

Bob] Dylan said, "I don't have to B.S. anybody like those guys up on Broadway that're always writin' about 'I'm hot for you and you're hot for me--ooka dooka dicka dee.' There's other things in the world besides love and sex that're important too. People shouldn't turn their backs on 'em just because they ain't pretty to look at. How is the world ever gonna get any better if we're afraid to look at these things.

Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

Is there anything worse than being trapped in a dream?

We need to get behind the surface appearances if we are to act coherently in the world. Otherwise, acting in response to misleading surface signals typically produces disastrous outcomes.

These data actually construct the fiction of a national economy when really there is no such thing; in Marx's terms, it is a fetish construct.

Do I dream you? Or you dream me? Or does someone, something bigger than all' - her hands swept the vast constellations above them - 'this beauteous calamity, dream everything we see and more?

In perennial Absence you see mystery, and in perennial Presence you see appearance. Though the two are one and the same, once they arise, they differ in name.

Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it.

it is possible for the same thing both to be and not to be.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…

Long before we have reached the last steps of the argument leading to our theory, we are already in Fairyland

When we think back on our past sensations and feelings, our thought is a faithful mirror that copies its objects truly; but it does so in colours that are fainter and more washed-out than those in which our original perceptions were clothed.

All beliefs about matters of fact or real existence are derived merely from something that is present to the memory or senses, and a customary association of that with some other thing.

Jika akan memilih buku apa saja, mari bertanya; Apakah di dalamnya terkandung penalaran abstrak mengenai kuantitas atau angka..? 'Tidak'. Apakah di situ terkandung penalaran eksperimental tentang kenyataan dan keberadaan..? 'Tidak'. Maka buanglah buku itu ke nyala api, sebab ia tak berisi apapun kecuali cara berpikir yang menyesatkan dan ilusi.

Whence can any cause be known but from its known effects? Whence can any hypothesis be proved but from the apparent phenomena? To establish one hypothesis upon another is building entirely in the air; and the utmost we ever attain by these conjectures and fictions is to ascertain the bare possibility of our opinion, but never can we, upon such terms, establish its reality.

?e smo prepri?ani, da ogenj greje ali da voda osvežuje, je to zgolj zato, ker bi nas misliti druga?e stalo preve? bole?ine.

Nada cierto podemos afirmar del mundo objetivo y del sujeto que lo mira, salvo que uno y otro son haces de percepciones instantáneas e inconexas ligadas por la memoria y la imaginación.

Truth is of two kinds, consisting either in the discovery of the proportions of ideas, consider'd as such, or in the conformity of our ideas of objects to their real existence (Hume, 1739, p. 495).

No tenemos una idea perfecta de nada más que de una percepción. Una substancia es enteramente diferente de una percepción. Por consiguiente, no tenemos una idea de substancia.

Todas as cores da poesia, apesar de esplêndidas, nunca podem pintar os objetos naturais de tal modo que se torne a descrição pela paisagem real. O pensamento mais vivo é sempre inferior à sensação mais embaçada.