Quotes About Reality

The one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.

Truth is omnipotent.

They are, mostly, sane people who are telling their story truthfully.

Philosophers, Wittgenstein said, had made the mistake of being like scientists chasing the meaning behind things – truth, mind, time, justice, reality – when none of this really matters, or is even achievable. A philosopher might waste his time wondering how he knew the child with the cut knee screaming her head off was really in pain, while the mother would rush in with comfort and bandages. The philosopher was clearly the one with lessons to learn.

The mistake, Wittgenstein argued, is in thinking philosophy can answer these questions. It comes partly from a flawed view of language that insists that if a word has meaning, there must be a thing attached to that meaning. The philosopher asks, 'What is reality?', 'What is justice?' or 'What is the mind?' and then goes looking with logic for the identity of that thing – and of course can't find it, because they are just words.

Only three things are real: God, human folly, and laughter. Since we can do nothing with the first two, we must do what we can with the third.

We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.

You're not me. You can't feel like I feel. I can feel. No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine. It's not fine. It's just not so bad.

Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say 'I do not know the time' . Without matter time itself is unknowable. Time is a function of matter; and matter therefore is the clock that makes infinity real.

But forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.

People won't admit it, they're too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can't see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there's always this if you scratch at the surface of happiness and goodness. The black and the black and the black.

It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.

I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love.

In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was a great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality - history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies. - The French Lieutenant's Woman

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it ... fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.

Images are inherently fascistic because they overstamp the truth, however dim and blurred, of the real past experience; as if, faced with ruins, we must turn architects, not archeologists.

If I could put a starving child before him and give it food and let him watch it grow well, I know he'd give money. But everything beyond what he pays for and sees himself get is suspicious to him. He doesn't believe in any other world but the one he lives in and sees. He's the one in prison; in his own hateful narrow present world.

If I could only escape, if I could only escape... he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless.

A fost odat? un tân?r prinÈ› care credea în toate lucrurile, în afar? de trei. Nu credea în prinÈ›ese, nu credea în insule, nu credea în Dumnezeu. Împ?ratul, tat?l s?u, îi spusese c? aceste lucruri nu exist?. ?i cum nu erau nici prinÈ›ese, nici insule È™i nici vreun semn al existenÈ›ei lui Dumnezeu în împ?r??ia tat?lui s?u, tân?rul prinÈ› îi d?du crezare.

Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it, I still think I can escape.

I have hope. But it's all an illusion.

Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things.

I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilization, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history or science to know then. I know now it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan—that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.

We were equally tired, in mid-century, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure.