Quotes About Reality

Como sólo está de veras cuerdo el que tiene consciencia de su locura

No, no es que me miró, es que me envolvió en su mirada; y no es que creí en Dios, sino que me creí un dios

Algo se marchitó de repente muy dentro de su ser: quizá la fe en la perennidad de la infancia. Advirtió que todos acabarían muriendo, los viejos y los niños. Él nunca se paró a pensarlo y, al hacerlo ahora, una sensación punzante y angustiosa casi le asfixiaba. Vivir de esta manera era algo brillante y, a la vez, terriblemente tétrico y desolado. Vivir era ir muriendo día a día, poquito a poco, inexorablemente.

Empezaba a darse cuenta de que la vida es pródiga en hechos que antes de acontecer parecen inverosímiles y luego, cuando sobrevienen, se percata uno de que no tienen nada de inextricables ni de sorprendentes.

Take care, your worship, those things over there are not giants but windmills.

Não posso negar o que vi, o que cheirei, o que senti, o que amei.

And once again I believe that nothing that's important really becomes lost. We just delude ourselves, thinking that we own the things, the moments and the others. Still with me are all the dead persons who I loved, all the friends who turned away, all the happy days that faded. I lost nothing but the illusion that everything could be mine forever.

Nada é eterno nem adquirido, tudo é fugaz e passageiro. A ilusão - seja a de felicidade ou a de tristeza - é acreditar num horizonte fechado, ao alcance da vista, que ignora ou finge ignorar os horizontes sucessivos que estão para além do imediato.

Gafita e o fudula si se crede frumusetea lumii, pentru ca barbatu-sau o poarta gatita. Frumoasa i s-a fi parand lui dar nu este.

While we cannot foresee the eventual results of creativity—of the attempt to impose our desires on reality, to become the main power that decides the destiny of every form of life on the planet—at least we can try to understand better what this force is and how it works. Because for better or for worse, our future is now closely tied to human creativity. The result will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.

For better or for worse, at this time science is still the most trustworthy mirror of reality, and we ignore it only at our peril.

In reality, to achieve such an ordered mental condition is not as easy as it sounds. Contrary to what we tend to assume, the normal state of the mind is chaos. Without

The only path to finding out what life is about is a patient, slow attempt to make sense of the realities of the past and the possibilities of the future as they can be understood in the present.

In our studies, we found that every flow activity, whether it involved competition, chance, or any other dimension of experience, had this in common: It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex. In

there are enough exceptions in every culture to show that goals are quite flexible. Individuals who depart from the norms—heroes, saints, sages, artists, and poets, as well as madmen and criminals—look for different things in life than most others do. The existence of people like these shows that consciousness can be ordered in terms of different goals and intentions. Each of us has this freedom to control our subjective reality.

Shaping one's own reality, living in a world one has created, can be as enjoyable as writing a symphony. No

But symbols can be deceptive: they have a tendency to distract from the reality they are supposed to represent.

A symbolic system is like a game in that it provides a separate reality, a world of its own where one can perform actions that are permitted to occur in that world, but that would not make much sense anywhere else.

The quality of experience of people who play with and transform the opportunities in their surroundings, as Joe did, is clearly more developed as well as more enjoyable than that of people who resign themselves to live within the constraints of the barren reality they feel they cannot alter.

Each person allocates his or her limited attention either by focusing it intentionally like a beam of energy—as do E. and R. in the previous examples—or by diffusing it in desultory, random movements. The shape and content of life depend on how attention has been used. Entirely different realities will emerge depending on how it is invested.

In each person's life, the chances of only good things happening are extremely slim. The likelihood that our desires will be always fulfilled is so minute as to be negligible.

Since what we experience is reality, as far as we are concerned, we can transform reality to the extent that we influence what happens in consciousness and thus free ourselves from the threats and blandishments of the outside world.

the past can never be literally true in memory: it must be continuously edited, and the question is only whether we take creative control of the editing or not.

Narcissistic individuals, who are mainly concerned with protecting their self, fall apart when the external conditions turn threatening. The ensuing panic prevents them from doing what they must do; their attention turns inward in an effort to restore order in consciousness, and not enough remains to negotiate outside reality.