Quotes About Reality

One could not spend one's life in the imaginings of another life.

It is difficult to want to tell a grave that it is not immortal. It's so obvious at that point.

Until that moment, I'd been living in my own little universe of good-luck hell.

The Buddha told his disciple Ananda to see impermanence, to see death with every breath. We must know death; we must die in order to live. What does that mean? To die is to come to the end of our doubts, all our questions, and just be here with the present reality. You can never die tomorrow; you must die now. Can you do it? If you can do it, you will know the peace of no more questions.

Every night, the TV news is like a nautre hike through the Book of Revelation.

Most marketing mistakes stem from the assumption that you're fighting a product battle rooted in reality.

In politics," said John Lindsay, "the perception is the reality." So, too, in advertising, in business, and in life.

To be successful today, you must touch base with reality. And the only reality that counts is what's already in the prospect's mind. To be creative, to create something that doesn't already exist in the mind, is becoming more and more difficult. If not impossible. The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what's already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.

All truth is relative. Relative to your mind or the mind of another human being. When you say, 'I'm right and the next person is wrong,' all you're really saying is that you're a better perceiver than someone else.

In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the altar, a couple would speak thus: We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, fro we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.

at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

But fantasies are often the best thing we can make of our multiple and contradictory wishes; they allow us to inhabit one reality without destroying the other. Fantasizing spares those we care about from the full irresponsibility and scary strangeness of our urges.

Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally 'together' – when subjectively, we feel dispersed and confused.

The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.

Valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress, they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments and, without either lying or embellishing, thus lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.

Love reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the inherent NORMALITY of the loved one

wisdom lies in correctly discerning where we are free to mould reality according to our wishes and where we must accept the unalterable with tranquillity. The

We aren't overwhelmed by anger whenever we are frustrated; only when we first believed ourselves entitled to a particular satisfaction and then did not receive it.

Though from a position of unrequited love they long to see their love returned, Marxists unconsciously prefer that their dreams remain in the realm of fantasy. Why should others think any better of them than they of themselves? Only so long as the loved one believes the Marxist to be more or less nothing, can the Marxist continue to believe the loved one to be more or less everything.

Then, in a further challenge to reality and because of the way she felt towards them, Chloe would (with the grin of a six-year-old child facing the power of its hostile impulses) tell her parents she could kill them by shutting her eyes and never thinking of them again - a plan which no doubt elicit a profoundly unphilosophical response from the parents.

Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.

Art can do the opposite of glamourizing the unattainable; it can reawaken us to the genuine merit of life as we're forced to lead it.

Delusions are not harmful in themselves, they only hurt when one is alone in believing in them, when one cannot create an environment in which they can be sustained.

With perspective in mind, we soon realize that – contrary to what the news suggests – hardly anything is totally novel, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely terrible.