Quotes About Reality

Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation. In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts.

Black space, blue world, just like the pictures, but with the startling high resolution of reality. Art stared down at West Africa and a great wave of nausea rolled through every cell of him.

The good that [Galileo] fought for is not so easy to express. But put it this way: he believed in reality. He believed in paying attention to it, and in learning what he could of it, and then saying what he had learned, even insisting on it. Then in trying to apply that knowledge to make things better, if he could. Put it this way: he believed in science.

The tiny imaginary audience inside his head did not exist; no one watches our life movies.

Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than any real thing. But this time who could say? This time might be the golden one at last

Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last.

Reality is mathematical, as long as you understand that uncertainty and contingency can be mathematically described, without them becoming any more certain.

When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?

Odd how a few sticks of furniture hung around like that. It made her feel better to see them. They would unpack, deploy the furniture, use it until it became invisible. Habit would once again cloak the naked reality of the world. And thank God for that.

All that day he spent distracted, wandering as if still in a dream, wondering from time to time how one told the difference. Wasn't this life dreamlike in every significant respect? Everything overlit, bizarre, symbolic of something else?

It's like being Calvin and watching Hobbes turn back into a stuffed doll.

Whether life means anything or not, joy is real.

No more fucking around, reality has struck

There was so much more going on than any one person could know, reality was so much bigger than the self, that it was alarming to contemplate. This explained the error: one felt the vastness and shrunk in on oneself like a snail's horns, instinctively trying to protect one's mind. And yet there was no real harm in it, this contact with the larger reality.

Science was a social construct, but it was also and most importantly its own space, conforming to reality only; that was its beauty.

Reality is not a matter of our senses. It can't be visualized.

Just because the need was urgent and her case was good, that didn't mean anything would change.

Pain may be the only reality but if mankind had any sense it would pursue the delusion called happiness. All the philosophers and poets who tell us that pain and suffering have a place and purpose in the cosmic order of things are welcome to them. They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves.

If you looked for demons around every corner, you would eventually find them. Real or imagined.

Memories are made of peculiar stuff, elusive and yet compelling, powerful and fleet. You cannot trust your reminiscences, and yet there is no reality except the one we remember......

We need to understand and combat fascism not because so many fell victim to it, not because it stands in the way of the triumph of socialism, not even because it might return again, but primarily because, as a form of reality production that is constantly present and possible under determinate conditions, it can, and does, become our production. The crudest examples of this are to be seen in the male-female relations, which are also relations of production.

What would it profit us, after all, even from a purely practical viewpoint, if we stripped life of all poetry, all dreams, all beautiful mysteries, all lies? What is truth, can you tell me that? You see, we only advanced by way of symbols, and we change the symbols as we progress.

Og menneske skulde man ikke være; nei, men gjenstand, ting. Når en mand stanset mig på gaten og spurte om veien vilde jeg kunne svare: Det vet jeg ikke. Men spør en anden gaslykt.

adskillige lækkerier, å hittil ukjendte nam-nam i dåser og sølvpapir, fra denne stund av var syltede pærer ikke længer et opspind og et æventyr for familjen Oliver...