Quotes About Reality

Boiled down to its core, the truth is always a simple, solid thing

The most elementary book on arithmetic contains more knowledge and insight about reality than the collected sayings of every guru who ever lived.

People doom and damn themselves with their own perverse and pessimistic beliefs about reality.

Do you accept reality, or shall the narcissistic individual have the absolute right to live in their own permanent fantasy world, and compel everyone else to go along with their fantasy? When the lunatic in a mental asylum says he is Napoleon, we must bellow, 'Vive l'Empereur!' and join his Grande Armée, and all march to Waterloo to meet our fate.

Mind can easily explain matter. Matter cannot explain mind at all. How do you get to mind from mindless matter? It's impossible. But mind can create "matter", or what passes as matter, routinely. It does it every time we dream.

Wavefunction collapse is anything other than "random". If you could really see what was going on, you would see that nothing ever happens randomly, any more than a dice throw produces a genuinely randomly outcome (if you could see what was going on, all the forces in play, you would know exactly what the outcome would be). Sensory ignorance is not ontological uncertainty. Reality knows exactly what it is doing even if you don't!

What is a dream? It's an externalized thought, a projected thought. The mind makes a world that seems separate from the mind, but is in fact wholly contained by the mind and vanishes when the mind ceases to think about it. The universe itself is just the same. It's a projected thought. It is born in mind, and mind can end it, and eventually does. Then starts it up again. A new dream is launched.

When man no longer regards himself as karmic he ceases to be so. That's the end of karma right there – when people stop believing in it, stop taking the idea seriously, stop treating it as real. Hinduism and Buddhism are total nonsense because they are predicated on karma, which is an illusion! They themselves say so!

What's silly is everybody trying to live longer," Gladys said. "They think they're adding years to their lives. What they don't realize is that all those years get added on the shit end.

Peekaboo teaches a baby to imagine the continuity of reality," George wrote. "And that's an important step toward achieving consciousness.

as far as Buzz is concerned, the universe is two things: me and not me.

To deal with the stark reality of having hit or hurt a woman or child, to deal with the initial responsibility you have not to do that and the knowledge you did do it, can be incredibly hard.

To be famous and broke is hard.

Place in writing often exists at that intersection between the reality of place and one's imagination about that place -- what one believes, hopes, or imagines about the various possibilities of oneself in that place.

The light of love shines " in the darkness" (John 1:5), in suffering, in confusion, in all that we will never understand. Love makes darkness itself shine. This opens altogether new possibilities for dealing creatively with the shadow side of reality. Words can only serve as pointers; we must put this to the test in our own dark hours. Those who have done so, those who have suffered lovingly, have discovered the transformative power of love.

After all, how could I be a person if Ultimate Reality were impersonal?

If Dulles could use a person, that person was somehow real for him. If not, that person didn't exist.

Siempre he sospechado que la amistad está sobrevalorada. Como los estudios universitarios, la muerte y las pollas largas.

the one certain thing in life is that no one can make the truth untrue simply because it hurts.

Evolution has given us minds tuned for survival and only incidentally for truth.

Stop trying to change reality by eliminating complexity.

Humiliation is mostly something we try to avoid, but it is something more often, all for the best, in retrospect. There is a lovely root to the word, the Latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returned to the ground of our being. Any fancy ideas we have about ourselves are shriven away by the reality of the moment. We come to earth with a thump. It may be a narrow piece of ground, but at least it is real and at least it is our own.

To be disappointed is to reassess our self and our inner world, and to be called to the larger foundational reality that lies beyond any false self we had only projected upon the outer world.

Ambition is natural to the first steps of youth, who must experience its essential falsity to know the larger reality that stands behind it, but held on to too long, and especially in eldership, it always comes to lack surprise, turns the last years of the ambitious into a second childhood, and makes the once successful into an object of pity.