Quotes About Reality

If we can't wake up to the fact that deep down inside we are good, then we deserve to remain asleep dreaming we are evil.

He began with the profound assumption that because the true, unadulterated consciousness of each human is ultimately godhead, then godhead already is our true, natural, and essential identity. We don't need to climb anywhere. Each of us already is number One on the Tree of Life. All lower (sleepier) levels of consciousness with which we may currently identify are illusionary—dream selves that we temporarily misidentify as our Self.

Alcohol tells truth, but its truth is not normal.

I am. I was. I am not. I never am.

It is good that man should accept at face value the cheats of sense and snares of flesh, and through the fogs of sentiency pursue the lures and lies of passion.

Life, in a sense, is living and surviving. And all that makes for living and surviving is good. He who follows the fact cannot go astray, while he who has no reverence for the fact wanders afar.

Some sorts of truth are truer than others.

Then one can't make a living out of poetry? Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.

There is another way of disqualifying the metaphysicians.... Judge them by their works. What have they done for mankind beyond the spinning of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own shadows for gods?

Faith ... is a conscious apprehension of something inevident, something which unlike this desk and this chair is not seen to be there, even if it enters into the fabric of our personal relations to reality with at least as much force, relevance, and moment as things which are seen to be there.

A personal philosophical experience of moving out of a world of sense and arriving, dazed and disoriented for a while, into a universe of being.

we should cast aside all childish games that fetter and exhaust body, speech and mind; and stretching out in inconceivable nonaction, in the unstructured matrix, the actuality of emptiness, where the natural perfection of reality lies, we should gaze at the uncontrived sameness of every experience, all conditioning and ambition resolved with finality.

The highest exercise of imagination is not to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, though unseen by the outward eye--not creation, but insight.

I feel like, when we're kids, you're sold into this fairy tale of what love is. That Prince Charming's gonna come along and save you and you're gonna live happily ever after. They're gonna rescue me from the Bronx, and we're gonna go off and live in a castle somewhere and it's gonna be awesome. He's gonna love me forever, and I'm gonna love him forever, and it's gonna be real easy. And it's so different than that.

But don't you see, pervading the letter and guiding the pen, the great intellectual and moral defect of the present day? I mean, the habit of dwelling on appearances, not on realities, of preferring the report to the bullet, and the echo to the report.

The inner reality of history is so unlike the back of the cards, and it takes so long to get at it, which does not prevent us from disbelieving what is current as history, but makes us wish to sift it, and dig through mud to solid foundations.

By the time I'd grown up, I naturally supposed that I'd be grown up.

Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction.

Woman! experience might have told me, That all must love thee who behold thee: Surely experience might have taught Thy firmest promises are nought: But, placed in all thy charms before me, All I forget, but to adore thee.

Sleep hath its own world, A boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world, And a wide realm of wild reality, And dreams in their development have breath, And tears and tortures, and the touch of joy.

Physical ills are the taxes laid upon this wretched life; some are taxed higher, and some lower, but all pay something.

What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.

Without question, his picture did not do him justice, but again, he was dead when it was taken

Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas; its universe was spider universe. All outside was irrational, extraneous, at best raw material for spider. As I proceeded on my way along the gully, like a vast impossible shadow, I realized that in the world of spider I did not exist.