Quotes About Reality

Physical vision - one might say scientific vision - brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite.

It's been my experience that worse-case scenarios are very rare indeed. Rare to the extend that you can almost count on them not happening.

Look not above, there is no answer there; Pray not, for no one listens to your prayer; Near is as near to God as any Far, And Here is just the same deceit as There.

Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they'd been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.

And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.

Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. ("Death Ship")

What dreams you white-frocked kiddies have in the sanctified cloister of your laboratories. You can make yourself believe anything after a while. As long as you can make up a measurement for it.

The essence of it all—this is the important part—was the knowledge that my thoughts had been real. Not just the things I said and did. What went on in my mind as well, positive or negative.

When matter is put aside, all creation becomes exclusively mental, that's all.

The last man in the world was irretrievably stuck with his delusions.

Con qué rapidez se acepta lo increíble si se ve con frecuencia!

O mundo ficou louco, pensou. Os mortos andam por aí e eu acho isso normal.

Oh, they knew it was something, but it couldn't be that -- not that. That was imagination, that was superstition, there was no such thing as that. And before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.

Richard Matheson

How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough!

But it was a rich, picture-perfect, it-can't-happen-here kind of suburb where people had gone, not to deal with life's problems, but to avoid them.

So there is some justice in this world, though not a lot.

But later when I was a teacher, an English teacher naturally, my students preferred fiction to reality. They were in junior high, and so they preferred ANYTHING to reality.

Are all my memories true? Every word, and growing truer with the years.

Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts' daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.

We don't make reality. We evade it. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won't be able to pay.

the world is an experiment in inventing validity, and conviction is its only proof.

The laws that govern the light from a firefly in my backyard as I write these words tonight also govern the light emitted from an exploding star one billion light-years away. Place changes nothing. Nor does time. One set of fixed rules runs the game, in all times and places. That's as big a truth as we Earthling have discovered, or ever will, in our brief run.

We don't make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won't be able to pay.