Quotes About Reality

We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality.

The shadow has become the substance.

We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? (The question was first posed by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley.) Simply, no—sound is a mental image created by the brain in response to vibrating molecules. Similarly, there can be no pitch without a human or animal present. A suitable measuring device can register the frequency made by the tree falling, but truly it is not pitch unless and until it is heard.

It's not just that we remember things wrongly (which would be bad enough), but we don't even know we're remembering them wrongly

Booker T. Washington wrote that "character, not circumstances", makes the person. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character." While character makes for a good story or poem, in reality we are less shaped by character traits than we think, and more than we realize by the circumstances that life deals us - and our responses to those circumstances.

Things as they are clash with things as our top-down invariant processes expect them to be. We shove sensation through the filter of the past to make the future predictable. In the process, we lose the present. But because the present is all that exists, we have lost everything in the bargain.

It is confusing to children if their reality of an experience is denied or misunderstood by their parent or another significant adult, because those are the very people with whom they most need to connect.

The experiential, subjective side of reality is non-objective in that you couldn't weigh it, hold it in your hand, or capture the subjective nature of such inner experiences with a camera—not even with a functional brain-imaging scanner. This

We want to believe health and youth can belong to us forever; we want to deny the reality of transience in our lives.

Given that the limbic area shapes how we appraise the meaning of events, knowing the hand model and seeing the limbic area's distinct location from the higher areas of the cortex can help us realize that sometimes a "feeling" is indeed not a fact.

being present with others involves the experience of openness to whatever arises in reality. Presence means being open, now, to whatever is. We

Relationships early in life may shape the very neural structures that create representations of experience and allow a coherent view of the world: Interpersonal experiences directly influence how we mentally construct reality.

Ever to be emphasized, however, is the reality that God's "seeing" is not the same thing as His "causing" something to happen.7

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.

You have no compelling moral intuitions to guide you in solving that problem. Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself.

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.

focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future.

Not all illusions are visual. There are illusions of thought, which we call cognitive illusions.

What you see is all there is

At the end of the day, you have to admit that it's just not cricket anymore; it is a multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry, that has to be viewed in a correct and sober perspective.