Quotes About Reality

And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

Nora quería vivir en un mundo en el que no existiera la crueldad, pero en los únicos mundos que tenía a su disposición había seres humanos

Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us. —J. G. BALLARD

You are you. The past is the past. The only way to make a better life is from inside the present. To focus on regret does nothing but turn that very present into another thing you will wish you did differently. Accept your own reality. Be human enough to make mistakes. Be human enough not to dread the future. Be human enough to be, well, enough. Accepting where you are in life makes it so much easier to be happy for other people without feeling terrible about yourself.

She didn't correct his knowledge of diamonds. She didn't tell him that while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond. According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.

You had to stay consistent to life's delusions. All you had was your perspective, so objective truth was meaningless. You had to choose a dream and stick with it. Everything else was a con.And once you had tasted truth and love in the same potent cocktail there had to be no more tricks.

So why do we bother with love? No matter how much we love someone we are never going to make them, or ourselves, free of pain.

I was convinced I wasn't made for the reality of the world. And in a way, I was right. I wasn't made for the world. I was, like everyone, made by the world. I was made by parents and culture and TV and books and politics and school and maybe even shopping centres. So, I either needed a new me. Or a new planet. And I didn't yet know how to find either. Which is why I felt suicidal.

But the truth is, it only half-works, you know? Places are places and memories are memories and life is fucking life.

I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunize you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can't have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness forever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality

it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness.

I have only been in love once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It's a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.

You realised that we weren't special. We weren't superheroes. We were just old. And that, in cases such as Hendrich, it didn't really matter how many years or decades or centuries had passed, because you were always living within the parameters of your personality. No expanse of time or place could change that. You could never escape yourself.

El pasado y el futuro son mitos. El pasado no es más que un presente muerto y el futuro, en cualquier caso, nunca existirá, porque para cuando uno llega al futuro ya se ha convertido en presente.

but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As Thoreau wrote, 'It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Possibility is everything that has ever happened. The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that - and we shall - there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is.

in quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once. In the same place. Quantum superposition.

Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world

Somehow I'd hoped that this would be the summer that I would discover that I was alive. The world my mom and dad said was out there waiting for me. That world doesn't actually exist.

But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

Ari believed we are all a simulation. Matter is an illusion. Everything is silicon. He could be right. But your emotions? They're solid.

After all, humans – especially adult ones – want to believe the most mundane truths possible. They need to, in order to stop their world-views, and their sanity, from capsizing and plunging them into the vast ocean of the incomprehensible.

She wondered how many Dans there were in the world, dreaming of things they would hate if they actually got them. And how many were pushing people into their delusional idea of happiness?