Quotes About Reality

The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.

metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.

The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality.

A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.

Oh, the laws of physics and of logic…the number system…the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.

A photograph can show a physical image in which time is static, and a mirror can show a physical image in which time is dynamic, but I think that what he saw on the mountain was another kind of image altogether which was not physical and did not exist in time at all.

To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral truth.

The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.

I spit on my glove tips, touch it and can see the sizzle. Not good.

They were living in some kind of movie projected by this intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their happiness, saying: PARADISE PARADISE PARADISE but which had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself—and from each other.

What he's looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it is all around him. Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.

What we have here is a conflict of visions of reality. The world as you see it right here, right now, is reality, regardless of what the scientists say it might be. That's the way John sees it. But the world as revealed by its scientific discoveries is also reality, regardless of how it may appear

Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too "scientific". Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.

What is the truth and how do you know it when you have it?... How do we really know anything? Is there an I a soul, which knows, or is this soul merely cells coordinating senses?... Is reality basically changing, or is it fixed and permanent?... When it's said that something means something, what's meant by that?

They contain no matter," I continue, "and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people's minds.

My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn't that superior. IQs aren't that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quarks are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.

that when the Platypus was discovered, scientists said it was a paradox. But Pirsig's point was it was never a paradox or an oddity. It didn't make sense only to the scientists because they viewed the nature of animals according to their own classification, when nature did not have any.

The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way it ever is. People should see that it's never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It's never been anything else, ever, but you can't get that across in an essay.

the reality of the Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future mind of man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why today we have so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality, even though there is no more agreement in one area than in the other.

Kad jedna osoba pati od iluzije, to se naziva poreme?enoš?u uma. Kad mnogo ljudi pati od iluzije, to se naziva religijom.

All nature has is a potential for steel. There's nothing else there. But what's 'potential'? That's also in someone's mind!... Ghosts.

The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

He isn't so interested in what things mean as in what they are.