Quotes About Reality

Behind every legend, strange to say, can be found a kernel of truth, a group of facts around which the legend was built.

Almost all arguments for skepticism make reference to seemingly ridiculous possibilities—we are being deceived by an evil demon, life is just a dream, we are brains in vats. You might propose psychoanalysis, rather than philosophical reflection, for anyone who worries about these possibilities.

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.

And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space - was treated with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter - pleasure, joy, friendship, loved - was deemed somehow peripheral.

Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not.

It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible. It's believing in reality that does us in every time.

It was a fabled railway that was the issue of desperation and fanaticism, made as much of myth and unreality as it was to be of wood and iron and the thousands upon thousands of lives that were to be laid down over the next year to build it. But what reality was ever made by realists?

I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.

Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.

But, for now, I retreated back down the little hidden staircase into the familiar world of the basement of the Natural History Museum, and to the embrace of the trilobites.

I don't know any of us who are in relationships that are totally honest - it doesn't exist.

People come to Washington believing it's the center of power. I know I did. It was only much later that I learned that Washington is a steering wheel that's not connected to the engine.

Uma população que afirma, indignada, que é perfeitamente sã agora devora drogas psicotrópicas, como se estivesse pondo açúcar nos flocos de milho.

As únicas doenças que os "curandeiros" curam são as que seus clientes imaginativos não têm.

It takes a special sort of mindset and worldview to insist, despite compelling or contradictory evidence, that the mechanistic paradigm of reality must be true and accurate, and that nothing can exist beyond the boundaries of physical reality.

Just as in San Antonio Greene distrusted the comforts of America, in Mexico he sees piety as a distraction from human reality. The once-pampered priest understands himself more as his clerical garments wear out and his shoes lose their soles so that his feet are exposed to dirt, stones, and snakes.

Greene's passion for West Africa is not reducible, however, to a flight from marital troubles or an effort to stave off depression. As we have seen, he distrusted the veneers of a comfortable life and felt that reality was only knowable under conditions of privation. His quest for absolutes required such conditions, and if Greeneland, a term he disliked, has a central place it may just be the little house in Freetown, which he came to regard as home.18

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient to living. It's a way of looking at life through a distorted telescope, and that's what makes you laugh at the terrible realities. Whimsy, which is a deliberate contradiction of reality, is pure escapism. And without whimsy, none of us can live." Fantasy and whimsy are not merely necessary for life; they are Dr. Seuss's stock-in-trade. But there are limits to their reach.

Real people have trouble with long division if they don't have a calculator, sometimes forget their spouse's birthday, and have a hangover on New Year's Day.

Many start with unrealistic expectations about the chance of success: the vast majority believe their chance of success to be far above average, and a third or so believe their success is a sure thing (Cooper, Woo, and Dunkelberg, 1988)!

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." People

The first step to overturning conventional wisdom, when conventional wisdom is wrong, is to look at the world around you. See the world as it is, not as others wish it to be.

If you will only ask yourself, "Is what I am being told really true?," it is amazing how much you can find is, or borders on, being false, even in a well-developed field!

Very few of us in our saner moments believe that the particular postulates that some logicians have dreamed up create the numbers - no, most of us believe that the real numbers are simply there and that it has been an interesting, amusing, and important game to try to find a nice set of postulates to account for them.