Quotes About Reality

Everything dreamed because it was alive, and everything lived because it was permitted to dream.

I had become an inward being, and I walked as in an inward world; everything outside me became a dream; what I had understood till now became unintelligible.

Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.

In fact, one big lesson from Buddhism is to be suspicious of the intuition that your ordinary way of perceiving the world brings you the truth about it.

The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.

I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don't have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.

The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter.

People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth.

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die

The road back to reality, we suggest, begins by making two affirmations about nature: the uniqueness of the universe and the reality of time. These together have an immediate consequence which is the central hypothesis of our program: that the laws of nature evolve, and they do so through mechanisms that can be discovered and probed experimentally because they concern the past.

In such a view, time is not emergent. It is, in fact, the only aspect of reality that cannot emerge from a more fundamental background. We register its reality, always and everywhere, by recognizing the differential character of change: some things change relative to other things. However, the kinds of things that there are also change, and so do the ways in which they change. That is what time is: the transformation of transformation.

All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children....

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.

An infant is a seed. Is it an oak seed or a cabbage seed? Who knows. All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages.

Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable facts? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvelous is indeed an aspect of the real?

You're all mad for words. Words are just farts from a lot of fools who have swallowed too many books. Give me things!

How much more complicated life is than the attainment of a Ph.D. would lead one to believe!

If I know this, I ought to be able to escape the stupider kinds of illusion. The absolute nature of things is independent of my senses (which are all I have to perceive with), and what I perceive is an image of my own psyche.

people don't want to believe the truth about themselves. They get some mental picture of themselves and then they devil the poor old body, trying to make it like the picture. When it won't obey-can't obey, of course-they are mad at it, and live in it as if it were an unsatisfactory house they were hoping to move out of.

But even Wagner, with his magnificent music and his rather less worthy pseudo-medieval words, is never wholly successful. Why? Because a work of art must be in some measure coherent; but thought and feeling mingled, as all of us experience them, are surging and incoherent. Thought and feeling trimmed into coherence in a work of art are still far from reality, still far from the agonizing confusion that rises like miasma in what a great poet has called the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

The beginning and the end- the origin and the consummation- are always in the same place, always the same thing, truthfully speaking. This spiritual maxim is one of the foundational wisdoms of the entire Western world- the oneness of beginning and end means that everything is a circle, held together, complete as it is. The firmly bound nature of the circle of reality is nothing more or less than the adamantine, circular bond of Fate itself, holding everything together as it must be.

It is problematic because, taken together, the whole--composed of lies and truth--forms a truth of its own.

Such elaborations of the story necessarily added extensively to the Gospel narratives and their realism would have stimulated strong responses in an audience, prompting them to weep, even cry out in outrage. The tendency to confuse the drama with reality often aroused anti-Jewish prejudice when they presented the crucifixion as a perfidious plot of Jews against Christ.

People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.