Quotes About Reality

the truth is often a mixed message

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

suggested a "compensating fantasy" here that builds on Smith's arrest and trial in South Bainbridge

Smith's confidence prevented him from appreciating the possibility of failure. The only thing that lay ahead was planning and building—turning his utopian vision into reality.

Yes. That's why it's so hard to look in a mirror. You are looking at yourself, but you don't recognize yourself. It's a shock. The person you see is older, and heavier, and has wrinkles. But you don't feel that way inside, and it's hard to believe that's how you really look now, how other people see you.

I had amazing stuff happen right off the top. I thought this was how it worked. Hollywood is awesome! Cut to three years later: What happened?

We tell our stories, especially as young people, in part because we want them to be true. We want life to be full of adventure and creativity and daring that might, just might, be real.

The truth about our lie. The truth about our lie? Or was it a lie about the truth? Truth and lies. Lies and Truths. Lielielielielie. Truthtruthtruththruthtruth.

I'm thinking about past events. I'm interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.

Meadow found it riveting: what machines of comforting delusions we humans are. Our language, our words, our ever treading minds and interior thoughts, all of these to make an architecture of lies that even we almost believe. No wonder the world is such a mean place, each of us judging one another without seeing our own terrible cruelties.

Fostering magical thinking, the chivalric romance yields a space-time in which the marvelous co-exists at all times with mundane routines. Its magic is able to envision the invisible, to endow the amorphous with palpable shape, and to place illusion and reality on the same level. Concurrently, the romance reminds us that it is essential to value the magical realm's irreducible alterity and inscrutability, rather than attempt to tame it by rationalizing its wonders.

If the super-rich believe that they are no longer part of society and have little need of government, it is not because this belief corresponds to objective reality.

SANTIAGO RONCAGLIOLO: I always start from real emotions and experiences because I think that gives the narrative a lot of force. But the act of writing consists precisely in distorting those facts through fiction, injecting them with lies, until fantasy overtakes reality. The truth is never enough. That's why I write novels.

No one with panic attacks and anxiety has ever gone 'crazy,' " the site claims. "In fact, because you realize that you have panic attacks, this is just another indication that you are not going crazy. People that 'go crazy' lose contact with reality. Anxious people are too much in contact with reality. Thus, people with panic and anxiety problems NEVER 'go crazy.' It simply cannot happen.

I believe in the transformative power of cinema. It is only through this shared dream-experience that we can transcend the oppressive minutiae of daily existence and find some spiritual connection in the deeper reality of our mutual desire.

When I was, like thirteen I thought it would be really cool to be a prostitute... I Thought It was like handsome guys would take you out on these romantic dates and you´d fuck them and then they´d pay you...

I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not aware of it passing.

Things as certain as death and taxes, can be more firmly believed.

How do we know that even the realest of realities wouldn't be subjective, in the final analysis? Nobody can prove his existence, can he?

Doomsday, when it came, wouldn't be a physical phenomenon; it would be an all-inclusive erasure of simulectronic circuits.

In the largest effectiveness study to date, with more than four thousand patients with major depressive disorder in primary care and community settings, only 31 percent were in remission after 14 weeks of optimal treatment. In most double-blind trials of antidepressants, the placebo response rate hovers around 30 percent . . . The unfortunate reality is that current medications help too few people to get better and very few people to get well.

Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know—that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.

The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what they eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.

When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won't really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later.