Quotes About Reality

but repentance is faith's fruit, and there is no more reality in a profession of faith than there is reality of repentance accompanying it.

So the human heart was created in the context of the perfection of the garden of Eden. But we don't live there now. This is why our instincts keep firing off the lie that perfection is possible. We have pictures of perfection etched into the very DNA of our souls.

Ps 23:1...So, if the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not become empty. I shall not live in a constant state of disappointment where circumstances drain me dry... How do I let the Lord shepherd me so the gap between my expectations and reality closes? (p. 115-6)

Usually, the most disappointing realities come from the most realistic expectations. An unmet longing from a realistic expectation is such a searing pain within a human heart.

You can't edit reality to try and force healing. You can't fake yourself into being okay with what happened. But you can decide that the one who hurt you doesn't get to decide what you do with your memories. Your life can be a graceful combination of beautiful and painful.

What we see will violate what we know unless what we know dictates what we see.

What we see will violate what we know unless what we know dictates what we see. Bob

Truth makes on the surface of nature no one track of light -- every eye looking on finds its own.

Torture is a good way to get people to talk but a poor method of finding out the truth; people confess whether there is any reality to the confession or not. -Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

Durant les longues nuits et les longues journées passées sous l'effet de la cocaïne dans la chambre de Yag, il me vint à l'esprit que ce qui importe à l'homme ce ne sont pas les événements survenus dans sa vie, mais seulement les répercussions de ces événements dans sa conscience.... ...L'homme vit donc non des événements du monde qui l'entoure mais des reflets de ces événements dans sa conscience.

The fascination of trifles obscures the good," says the Wise Man. It is difficult in the midst of much doing and seeing to keep alive and present to the deepest reality, to the really real. And so the monk goes apart…

When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.

Perception of a state is not the state.

Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can.

Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontravertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.

in the morning -- 'When the world looks promising again despite what we know about it' -- ...

I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape…. If you read for escape you will never try to change your life, or anyone else's. It's a politically barren act, if nothing else. The overuse of imaginative fiction enables people to avoid the knowledge that they are actually alive.

The point was that you have to look at the world as it is, not as some elegant theory says it ought to be.

After Sutherland left ARPA for Harvard, moreover, Roberts would start a collaboration with him on what would now be called virtual reality, complete with the world's first 3-D virtual headset.)

All life is death. You don't fool yourself about this anymore. You slash at the perfect canvas with strokes of paint and replace the perfect picture of your imagination with the reality of what you are capable of. From death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create. This is what it means, you finally realize, to be alive. ("The Chambered Fruit")

We depend upon cognitive assent and affective assurances to substantiate the reality of our relationship with God. If we can't "know" or "feel" God, we customarily doubt our relationship with God. But such "knowing" and "feeling" restrict God to the narrow limits of our minds and senses and reduce our relationship with God to the maintenance of such feedback.

the Christian life in its fullness is far more than being active in a Christian community, affirming a certain set of beliefs or adopting a particular behavior pattern. These are a secondary result of the primary reality of a life engaged in an ever deepening union with God in love.

The denial of suffering is, in fact a better definition of illness than its acceptance.

Mental health increases as we pursue reality at all cost.