Quotes About Reality

É que toda vez que queremos imitar alguma coisa que se passou realmente, esquecemos que essa coisa foi produzida não pela vontade de imitar, mas por uma força inconsciente e, por sua vez, real.

Stiamo tutti costretti, per renderci sopportabile la realtà, a coltivare dentro di noi qualche piccola follia.

Now that Olympus no longer exists, its inhabitants dwell upon the earth.

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go to look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.

and helped me better understand what a contradiction it is to search in reality for memory's pictures, which would never have the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from not being perceived by the senses.

But the ideas that leave no possibility of a rejoinder are those that are not properly speaking ideas, those that, by being supported by nothing, find nothing to attach to in the other's mind: on the one side, no brotherly branch is held out, and on the other, there is nothing but a vacuum. The arguments advanced by M. de Norpois (on questions of art) were indisputable because they were devoid of reality.

The true greatness of art is to find, grasp, and bring out that reality which we all live a great distance from; that reality which we run the risk of dying without having known, which is quite simply our own life.

When I saw any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form;

But certain favourite parts are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.

Some philosophers argue that the external world does not exist and that it is only within ourselves that our lives evolve. Be that as it may, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means for us. If I had had to draw, describe or inventory the details of Mlle d'Éporcheville's features from memory, or even to recognize her in the street, I would have found it impossible.

How many times in the course of my life reality had disappointed me because at the moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only means of enjoying beauty, could not be applied to it by virtue of the inevitable law which only allows us to imagine that which is absent.

The reason why life may be judged to be trivial, although at certain moments to us, it seems so beautiful, is that we form our judgement ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself, but of the mental images which preserve nothing of life and therefore, we judge it disparagingly.

And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her? I felt that she would have regarded me as mad, for I no longer thought of those desires which came to me on my walks, but were never realized, as being shared by others, or as having any existence apart from myself.

They seemed nothing more now than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creatures of my temperament

I no longer loved Albertine. At most there were occasional days which brought the kind of weather that, modifying and stimulating our sensitivity, restores our contact with reality, making me feel bitterly sad when I thought of her. I suffered from a love that no longer existed. Thus when the weather changes do amputees feel pain in the leg they have lost.

They were in no way connected now with nature, with the world of real things, which from now onwards lost all its charm and significance, and meant no more to my life than a purely conventional framework, just as the action of a novel is framed in the railway carriage, on a seat of which a traveller is reading it to pass the time.

Les faits ne pénètrent pas dans le monde où vivent nos croyances, ils n'ont pas fait naître celles-ci, ils ne les détruisent pas.

bij alles wat het stempel draagt van de werkelijke dood, die zo verschilt van zijn logische en abstracte mogelijkheid ...

For existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand, when some trivial incident becomes a springboard for romance. Then a whole promontory of the inaccessible world emerges from the twilight of dream and enters our life, our life in which, like the sleeper awakened, we actually see the people of whom we had dreamed with such ardent longing that we had come to believe that we should never see them except in our dreams

It is the same in life; the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune ; but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination ; for in reality its alteration, like that of a certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

Say not: I live today, I shall die tomorrow. Divide not reality between life and death. Say: now I live and die.

Ne dis pas : je vis maintenant, je mourrai demain. Ne divise pas la réalité entre la vie et la mort. Dis : maintenant je vis et je meurs.

Was there a straight line on earth before we drew one?

Of course, there are things that are indifferent to human opinion – gravity, the moondriven motion of the tides, the boiling point of water. But the finer details of reality – the state of a marriage, artistic merit, a person's true nature – have something delicate and consensual about them.