Quotes About Reality

One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.

The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove. It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience'.

An idealism previously directed at gods and spirits has been rerouted towards human subjects – an ostensibly generous gesture nevertheless freighted with forbidding and brittle consequences, since it is no simple thing for any human being to honour over a lifetime the perfections he or she might have hinted at to an imaginative observer in the street, the office or the adjoining aeroplane seat.

Infatuations aren't delusions.

It is significantly more important to Rabih now that he remains attractive to Kirsten than that he is a truthful correspondent of the reality of his inner life.

We cease to appreciate things when we believe that life should be perfect and we can eradicate all known problems.

La razón por la cual la vida puede tenerse por trivial, aunque en determinados momentos nos parezca tan hermosa, radica en que nos formamos ese juicio, por lo general, no a partir de la vida misma, sino a partir de las imágenes sin duda distintas que nada han preservado de la vida, y por consiguiente la juzgamos en términos desdeñosos.

We must reconcile ourselves to the necessary imperfectability of existence

this is the one world we will ever know. 5.

There is dangerous innocence in the expectation of a life formed on the basis of probability.

Pronouncing a lover "perfect" can only be a sign that we have failed to understand them. We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.

It may be a sign that two people have stopped loving one another (or at least stopped wishing to make the effort that constitutes ninety per cent of love) when they are no longer able to spin differences into jokes. Humour lined the walls of irritation between our ideals and the reality: behind every joke, there was a warning of difference, of disappointment even, but it was a difference that had been defused - and could therefore be passed over without the need for a pogrom.

A single idea recurs throughout his work: that we best endure those frustrations which we have prepared ourselves for and understand and are hurt most by those we least expected and cannot fathom. Philosophy must reconcile us to the true dimensions of reality, and so spare us, if not frustration itself, then at least its panoply of pernicious accompanying emotions.

The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgement, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life—and therefore we judge it disparagingly.

True beauty is indeed the one thing incapable of answering the expectations of an over-romantic imagination.…

To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory.

In the end, you can always convince yourself that a version of the truth is the truth itself.

Still as I've said all along, you can't polish a turd.

Anxiety is a sign that you have made up a story contrary to reality. Love does not fear.

The images we impress upon our mind, especially when accompanied by emotion, yield the same experience whether they are true or fictional.

Your thoughts do not create reality. They either permit it or they do not.

El novelista Ray Cummings dice que el tiempo es «lo que evita que todo suceda a la vez». Todo lo que ha existido alguna vez, sigue existiendo, existirá, y todo lo que podría existir, existe ahora. El

The ego romanticizes the past to avoid the true romance of the present.