Quotes About Reality

I really should talk to him. He's had a near-death experience!" We all have. It's called living. (Hogfather)

Just remember what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening.

Real problems sooner or later are resolved; on the contrary, pseudoproblems are not.

Sooner or later in life, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unobtainable . . . Our ever-sufficient knowledge of the future opposes it and this is called in the one instance: hope.

Het lijkt me overbodig hieraan toe te voegen dat geen enkel feit verzonnen is.

Sá»›m hay muá»™n trong cuá»™c ??i mình, má»—i ng??i s? khám phá ra r?ng h?nh phúc hoàn h?o là không có th?t nhÆ°ng ít ai ch?u ng?m nghÄ© v? Ä'i?u ng??c l?i: r?ng má»™t sá»± b?t h?nh hoàn h?o cÅ©ng không h? có...

Oggi, questo vero oggi in cui io sto seduto a un tavolo e scrivo, io stesso non sono convinto che queste cose sono realmente accadute.

Alas for the dreamer: the moment of consciousness that accompanies the awakening is the acutest of sufferings.

Se si escludono istanti prodigiosi e singoli che il destino ci può donare, l'amare il proprio lavoro (che purtroppo è privilegio di pochi) costituisce la miglior approssimazione concreta alla felicità sulla terra: ma questa è una verità che non molti conoscono.

Get up": the illusory barrier of the warm blankets, the thin armor of sleep, the nightly evasion with its very torments drops to pieces around us, and we find ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to insult, atrociously naked and vulnerable. A

A good prospector, a serious one, who does not want to tell lies either to others or himself, should not trust in appearances, because this rock, which seems dead, is in fact full of deception: sometimes it changes its nature even while you're digging, likes certain snakes change color so you won't see them.

Ay de quien sueña: el momento de conciencia que acompaña al despertar es el sufrimiento más agudo

He warps your perspective on the current events in your life until reality appears much worse and more desperate than it truly is.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the observation that when lust takes control, "At this moment God . . . loses all reality. . . . Satan does not fill us with hatred of God, but with forgetfulness of God."5

When we are in the grip of lust, the reality of God fades.

But none of us can claim an innate spiritual advantage. In reality, we are all equally disadvantaged. None of us naturally seeks after God, none is inherently righteous, none instinctively does good (cf. Romans 3:9-18). Therefore, as children of grace, our spiritual discipline is everything — everything! I repeat . . . discipline is everything!

We belittle what we cannot bear. We make figments out of fundamentals, all in the name of preserving our own peculiar fancies. The best way to secure one's own deception is to accuse others of deceit.

Only madmen and historians, he said, believe their lies.

Intelligent people, Achamian had found, were typically less happy. The reason for this was simple: they were better able to rationalize their delusions. The ability to stomach Truth had little to do with intelligence—nothing, in fact. The intellect was far better at arguing away truths than at finding them.

Conviction, no matter how narcotic its depth, simply did not make true.

Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies—words—and so sank or floated with equal ease.

The eyes of men were but pinholes...All their books, even their scriptures, were nothing more than pinholes. And yet, because they couldn't see what was unseen, they assumed they saw everything, they confused pinpricks with the sky.

Sometimes he would stare at the bare trees for so long, they would lose their radial dimensions and seem something flat, like blood smeared into the wrinkles about an old woman's eyes.

to observe a thing always is to observe a thing not at all.