Quotes About Reality

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

No one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word "day.

Believe me, Athelstan, you can wrap a dog's turd in a cloth of gold but it remains a dog's turd.

Always remember a useful dictum: every man born of woman is three persons; what he appears to be, what he claims to be and,' he beamed round, 'what he really is.

every man born of woman is three persons; what he appears to be, what he claims to be and,' he beamed round, 'what he really is.

When it comes to weighing up evidence, we like to think of ourselves as deliberative and detached. We think carefully about the arguments and form an opinion or a belief in a dispassionate way. In reality, though, our beliefs often come first and then we search for evidence to support them. When the evidence supports a belief, we are proud of being right in the first place.

Misinterpreting is not the only route by which someone may believe his or her false account is true.

In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.

I don't believe that ghosts are "spirits of the dead" because I don't believe in death. In the multiverse, once you're possible, you exist. And once you exist, you exist forever one way or another. Besides, death is the absence of life, and the ghosts I've met are very much alive. What we call ghosts are lifeforms just as you and I are.

I've realized that prayer can become the occasion for a good bit of unintentional dishonesty with myself, or maybe an escape from my own messy reality.

Selfishness causes friction. It makes harmful sparks fly because it rubs the wrong way against reality. For Buddhists selfishness is not so much sinful as it is stupid. (But like Christian sin, it causes suffering, for self and others.)

Denial is often the first line of defense: refusing to accept that the bad news is true.

I would read accounts of so-called battles I had been in, and they had no relation whatever to what had happened. So I began to perceive that anything written was fiction to various degrees. The whole subject-- the difference between actuality and representation--was an interesting one. And that's what brought me to literature in the first place.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected.

Neuznávám žádnou jinou pravdu, kromÄ› pravdy umÄ›lecké lži.

Be patient, do nothing, cease striving. We find this advice disheartening and therefore unfeasible because we forget it is our own inflexible activity that is structuring the reality. We think that if we do not hustle, nothing will happen and we will pine away. But the reality is probably in motion and after a while we might take part in that motion. But one can't know.

You're such an optimist Kane -- that's your problem. You only end up disappointed.

He liked to say that what makes literature is "inventing truly from honestly acquired knowledge, so that what you make up is truer than what you might remember.

That's how the world is, and there is nothing an insignificant nobody like you, or even a significant somebody like me, can do about it.

Whatever discoveries have been made in the land of self-delusion, many undiscovered regions remain to be explored.

Don't think of it as a lie, think of it as the truth under imaginary circumstances.

No news is ever as good or as bad as it first seems

Sweeping and dramatic changes make for good theater, but in real life, they're not effective.