Quotes About Reality

Paul Rozin's discoveries that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. As Tamar Gendler points out, the mind works on two tracks. We know, consciously, that the bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty, and yet we can't help blurring the imagined and reality; our minds scream, "Dangerous object! Stay away!

I believe this in part because of Paul Rozin's discoveries that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. As Tamar Gendler points out, the mind works on two tracks. We know, consciously, that the bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty, and yet we can't help blurring the imagined and reality; our minds scream, "Dangerous object! Stay away!

Paradoxically, pain seems like something done to us, though in reality we have done it to ourselves, manufacturing the sensation. Whatever we might conceive of as "pain" occurs in the mind.

Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off.

Cosmology and neuropsychology have absurdity in common. The raw facts are strange beyond imagination.

When we see the brain we realize that we are, at one level, no more than meat; and, on another, no more than fiction.

Are you all right?' 'It's okay,' he says, 'I think I just swallowed some dark.' He has the notion that darkness is a substance. It will make you choke if you swallow too much in one go. I could have put him straight with some prosaic account of the coughing reflex being triggered by the shock of the cold air rather than a mouthful of darkness, but I didn't I stashed away the treasured image and left him with the version of reality fashioned by his infant brain.

This is the left hemisphere confabulating. It does this for all of us, every waking moment. It edits our conscious experiences, makes them comprehensible and palatable. It's the brain's spin-doctor.

The world suddenly vanished from view like a morning mist. I was left alone with Reality.

The second is to grasp the essential nature of the ego and of the universe and to obtain direct perception that both are nothing but a series of ideas which unfold themselves within our minds.

we are now as divine as we ever shall be—but we must wake up from illusion and see this truth.

However, in reality this pregnancy was something condemnable under the commandment for those who commit adultery according to the Jewish laws during this time. As

Ambition distorts even memory itself. John Quincy Adams

The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it.

Right now a moment of time is fleeting by! Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate… give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen before our time.

Good and evil, however, are views taken from a certain given standpoint, and from this standpoint good and evil are features forming a contrast, but as such they are always actualities; neither the one nor the other

They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, reality-wounded and reality-seeking.

EINMAL, da hörte ich ihn da wusch er de Welt, ungesehn, nactlang, wirklich. Eins und Unendlich, Vernichtet, Ichten. Licht war. Rettung.

A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea… . In this way, too, poems are en route… . Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality.

Ich kenne dich, du bist die tief Gebeugte, ich, der Durchbohrte, bin dir untertan. Wo flammt ein Wort, das für uns beide zeugte? Du—ganz, ganz wirklich. Ich—ganz Wahn.)

When man tries to imagine Paradise on earth, the immediate result is a very respectable Hell.

the real is actually the intersubjective meaning arrived at by a community in semiosis. One

So," he said to Sefton, "you knew that ghosts were real...and you led us to the 'most haunted building in London.' What's up with that?

To human beings it won't look or feel like a war, it'll be more like . . . one of those modernist paintings you lot do, if it melted. Inside all your brains. Forever.