Quotes About Reality

Jealousy, hatred, greed, and the like lead to suffering and dissatisfaction because they're out of step with reality. They paint a misleading picture of the world.

The basic Buddhist teaching of impermanence (Pali: anicca) suggests that even the most powerful spiritual experiences come and go like clouds in the sky. The point of practice is to realize a truth so deep and fundamental that it doesn't change, because it's not an experience at all; it's the nature of reality itself. This undeniable, unalterable realization is known as enlightenment.

Some master meditators achieve a particularly concentrated state of mind, samadhi, in which their mind is capable of gaining profound insights into reality.

How do we picture the past? Does it become clearer as it drifts into the distance? Can it be seen from more angles, a better vantage, with finer instruments for optics, and more supporting documentation to draw from? Or has its essence already vanished, leaving space for lies to multiply and thrive, spreading across paperwork that is good for nothing except, perhaps, a nervous acting captain's next snack?

All the best paintings made you see various levels of reality at once. They sent you inward as well as outward.

I've learned not to trust what I see on television.

Memory is a rehearsal for a show that never goes on.

There are no metaphysics.

Like other names I censored lately, this was a vote against invoking monsters, against etching their reality into the air.

The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions.

The truth is the truth. What changes is what we know about it and what we're willing to believe.

You have to keep your mind as wide-open as your eyes, because almost nothing is what it seems.

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.

She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be .

Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why.' I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, 'we exist because we exist. . .we could imagine all sorts of universes like this one, but this is the one that happened.

She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.

If it weren't my life, I wouldn't have believed it.

I said, 'I need to know how he died.' He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?' So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.

Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.

We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.

She repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.

They reciprocated the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things--willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.

It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing.