Quotes About Reality

I realized that I was judging myself against standards that weren't real, against expectations that were a fantasy, a fairy tale.

All our geese are swans.

The developers may think that the answer is to start over from scratch and redesign the whole system—but that's just the Hare talking again. The same overconfidence that led to the mess is now telling them that they can build it better if only they can start the race over. The reality is less rosy: Their overconfidence will drive the redesign into the same mess as the original project.

When you've lived in a cage, you can't bear not to run, even if what you're running towards is an illusion.

To say that Hegel is an idealist is to say that, at every turn, he argues that the world is thoroughly knowable, and it is nothing "beyond" the realm of conscious experience.

Stalin found a party machine in being. Where he differed from his predecessors in the secretaryship was in turning the position to his own political advantage. He set about building up a personal machine as an informal political reality within the official one, a Stalin empire in the party-state.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence on memory that shows memories are constructed by all of us and that the construction is a mixture of fact and fiction. Something similar is true for perception. Our perceptions are constructions that are a mixture of sense data processed by the brain and other data that the brain supplies to fill in the blanks.

Magic looks exactly like reality – only the effect is different.

I thought of Einstein, and his insistence that no particular point of view was more privileged than any other: in other words his 'general relativity', and its claim that the answer to the question 'What is real?" begins with the question 'Where are you standing?

And even if by chance he were to utter the perfect truth, he would himself not know it, for all is but a woven web of guesses.

The Hypotheticals took you and they remembered you and eventually they re-created you, and that means the real Turk Findley is as dead and long-gone as the real Allison Pearl. You're a convincing replica, but you were born in a desert with another man's memories—you're no more responsible for that man's sins than I am for Allison's.

We live at a certain level of abstraction; we interact as bodies, not cell colonies.

Not just pain, but bullshit. Avoiding bullshit.

We force ourselves to step outside our inner chamber of habitual thoughts and connect to the world, to other people, to reality.

Goethe epitomizes what was known in the Renaissance as the Ideal of the Universal Man—a person so steeped in all forms of knowledge that his mind grows closer to the reality of nature itself and sees secrets that are invisible to most people.

Daily Law: The fact that you are aware of this insignificance and smallness is paradoxically what renders you powerful and significant. It is an understanding of reality that no other animal is capable of. Such awareness can begin to restore to you that sense of awe and connection that comes from a proper sense of scale.

Honesty is actually a blunt instrument, which bloodies more than it cuts.

the tendency to mistake appearances for reality—the feeling that if someone seems to belong to your group, their belonging must be real.

You will think in terms of opposites—when people overtly display some trait, such as confidence or hypermasculinity, they are most often concealing the contrary reality.

They create in our thinking pronounced biases that are so deeply ingrained in us that we see evidence of them in all cultures and all periods of history. These biases, by distorting reality, lead to the mistakes and ineffective decisions that plague our lives. Being aware of them, we can begin to counterbalance their effects.

When we unconsciously disconnect ourselves from the awareness of death, we forge a rather loose relationship with time. We image that we have more time than is reality. Our minds drift to the future, where all our hopes and wishes will be fulfilled.

We humans like to imagine that we have an objective knowledge of the world. We take it for granted that what we perceive on a daily basis is reality—this reality being more or less the same for everybody. But this is an illusion. No two people see or experience the world in the same way. What we perceive is our personal version of reality, one that is of our own creation. To realize this is a critical step in our understanding of human nature.

Masters manage to blend the two—discipline and a childlike spirit—together into what we shall call the Dimensional Mind. Such a mind is not constricted by limited experience or habits. It can branch out into all directions and make deep contact with reality. It can explore more dimensions of the world.

Como la vida adulta es aburrida y acomodaticia, nos creamos la ilusión de que la infancia es una especie de edad de oro