Quotes About Reality

Most fairy tales are pretty dark.

The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I've never been really right in the head.

In my heart I know the truth, but my mind cannot accept the reality of what this all means.

Religion itself is an absurdity and an anomaly, and paganism is acceptable only because it represents that purely orgiastic phase of religion farthest from reality.

Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos.

Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions.

In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call "happiness", if we be but able to entertain them.

Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.

Two meanings have our lightest fantasies -- One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.

Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.

Peter Marin condemns the "inadequacy" of our psychological terminology in describing the magnitude and reality of the "pain of human conscience." As a society, he says, we seem unable to deal with moral pain or guilt.

Everyone recognizes reality (or recognizes what, in their experience, clearly pertains to reality) only because others designate it to them as such. Reality suffers from a species of inherent fragility, such that the reality of reality must incessantly be reinforced in order to endure.

The present moment is the only dimension of existence worth inhabiting, because it is the only one available to us. (...) Yet we live virtually all of our lives somewhere between memories, and aspirations, nostalgia and expectations.

True knowledge is not to be had solely through a combat against error, bad faith and untruth, but more generally, through a combat against the illusions inherent in the sensible world.

once inserted into the cosmos, once his individual life is set going in harmony with the cosmic order, the wise man understands that we simple mortals are merely a fragment of this whole, an atom of eternity, so to speak, one element of a totality that cannot disappear. So that, ultimately, for the sage, death ceases to be truly real. In a nutshell, death is but a passage from one state to another—and, considered as such, it should no longer hold any terrors for us.

appellation

I exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don't actually ever lie.

The world just goes along. Nothing much matters, you know? I mean really matters. but then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole lot.

Hay cosas de las que la gente nunca habla. No me refiero a las cosas difíciles, como el amor, sino a las más bochornosas, como por ejemplo que los funerales a veces son divertidos o que es emocionante ver arder un edificio. El funeral de Michael fue maravilloso.

She didn't realize how much the people scorned us, how they mocked her banal Communist clichés about their reality.

Ma wrote true stories; not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes. Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished, and edited to the extent that I'm not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn't matter: the story is the thing.

Aunque nos conociéramos... hacíamos como si no. Esperábamos en la cola, mientras las otras compraban jarabe para la tos de hidrato de terpina con codeína y firmaban en el aparatoso libro de registro. A veces con el nombre verdadero, a veces con uno inventado. Me daba cuenta de que, igual que yo, tampoco sabían cuál de las dos cosas era peor. A veces veía a la misma mujer en cuatro o cinco farmacias distintas en un solo día. Mujeres o madres de adictos.

Tony no abrió los ojos. Cualquiera que diga que sabe cómo te sientes es un iluso.