Quotes About Reality

Life can't be put on paper in all its complexity.

Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV.

You have to be able to access the profoundly spiritual understanding that people's actions, even their very identity, are not the whole truth of who they are.

Reality is merely one-tenth visible section of the iceberg that one sees above the surface of the ocean - art remaining nine-tenths of it that lies below the surface. That is why it is more near Truth than Reality itself. Art does not merely reflect Reality - it enlarges it.

His mother is having treatments by Dr. Froyd...it is quite hard for Dr. Froyd, because she cannot seem to remember which is a dream and which really happened to her. So she tells him everything, and he has to use his judgement. I mean when she tells him that a very very handsome young gentleman tried to flirt with her on Fifth Avenue, he uses his judgment.

Odd, she thought, how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love - soaked, drenched in love - only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined. Or weren't quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitable, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane.

Perhaps fear in the abstract is worse than facing the immediate reality.' Vera had still seemed preoccupied by morbid thoughts, but her voice had been cheerful. She probably wasn't afraid of anything. Joe hadn't bothered answering.

We're all supposed to be open about mental health these days. Very sympathetic. But the reality of the bloody thing, the person's self-obsession, the relentless movement, like they're constantly wired, the tedious repetition of paranoid thoughts, that hasn't changed. You can't know just how exhausting severe depression can be for other people until you've experienced it.

When she married Jeremy she had assumed there was money in the background. It hadn't quite worked out that way.

Perhaps fear in the abstract is worse than facing the immediate reality.

It takes a fearless, unflinching love and deep humility to accept the universe as it is. The most effective way he knew to accomplish that, the most powerful tool at his disposal, was the scientific method, which over time winnows out deception. It can't give you absolute truth because science is a permanent revolution, always subject to revision, but it can give you successive approximations of reality.

I'm just at the age when time speeds up in an odd way. Do you know what I mean? The winters come closer together and you learn to accept that you're not special anymore.

What I love about science is that it demands of us a tolerance for ambiguity. It requires us to live with humility regarding our ignorance, withholding judgment until the evidence comes in. That needn't prevent us from using the little we do know to search for and decrypt new languages of reality.

To know what is real, one must subject one's ideas to the rigorous, error-correcting mechanism of science, seeking verification that can be expressed mathematically.

the future depends on seeing reality clearly. But for some reason, we are easily manipulated and deceived.

We're not nearly as violent as the westerns.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?

What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream?

My husband was just OK looking. I was in labor and I said to him, 'What if she's ugly? You're ugly.'

I think that any sort of fantasy or sci fi that is grounded in something that could ostensibly be real - 'Jurassic Park' being my favorite example - is that much more prescient because it means that much more. Maybe one day, what if?

I started thinking, 'What if Superman or Batman really existed?' Superman would be doing Nike commercials. The members of Youngblood take the genre of super-heroes and turn it into a business.

Sometimes I think about, 'What if I'm not the person everyone idealizes me to be? Maybe I'm just a regular old Joe. What if I can't live up to all these expectations? Maybe I'm just not who they think I am or who they want me to be.

I think our families or parents were trying to do best by us by telling us, 'Do what you love.' On an existential level, they might have done their best by us, but I think, in terms of the reality principle, maybe less so.