Quotes About Reality

Paul Benacerraf, 'What Numbers Could Not Be,' Philosophical Review (1965).

Metaphors make connections with are not contained in the fabric of reality but created by our own associative powers. The important question about a metaphor is not what property it stands for, but what experience it suggests.

how can I know the world as it is? I can have knowledge of the world as it seems, since that is merely knowledge of my present perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings. But can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of how it seems? To put the question in slightly more general form: can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of my own point of view?

Religion, for Father Pavel, involved no escape from the natural into the supernatural, no repudiation of this world for the sake of a better one whose unreality made it more malleable to our wishes. In his perspective, the natural and the supernatural were one and the same: the world became transparent, with the light of eternity shining from the other side.

Throughout the proofs of the Ethics , therefore, the reader can never be certain whether the extraordinary ideas which are brought so compellingly before him are fiction or reality.

The idea that scientific method is the only method of discovering the truth has a lot to be said for it, if you mean by truth how the world ultimately is as a system of organised matter, but I defend cognitive dualism: that world can be understood completely in another way which also has its truths which are not translatable into the truths of science. So we have to look at the different ways we organise this material that science explains for us.

realities instead.

Which one is the right way? Huh? You're asking me that ? How should I know? Mortals call you Buddha. That is only because they are afflicted with language and ignorance.

The death of an illusion tends to disconcert.

How can you treat death so lightly? she asks. Because it happens, he replies. It is inevitable. I do not mourn the falling of a leaf or the breaking of a wave. I do not sorrow for a shooting star as it burns itself up in the atmosphere. Why should I?

Wishes, wishes. Wish in one hand and do something else in the other, and squeeze them both and see which comes true

Reality is approximately as dependable as a politician's promise... the result is the same: Reality, of the capital "R" variety, has become as relative a thing as the dryness of our respective Martinis. Yet the struggle goes on, the fight continues. Against what? Ultimately, Powers, Principalities, Thrones, and Dominations, often contained in hosts who are themselves victims, prisoners, manipulated men and women.

Time, too, is a function of Shadow, and even Dworkin did not know all of its ins and outs. Or perhaps he did. Maybe that is what drove him mad.

Let there be an end to thought. Thus do I refute Descartes.' I sprawled, not a cogito or a sum to my name.

Wishes, wishes, I told him, Wish in one hand and do something else in the other, and squeeze them both and see which comes true.

Before you are fully aware of anything else, you are aware whether you are awakening in your own bed.

Most people who daydream of transforming themselves into some vicious beast and going about tearing people's throats out, dismembering them, disfiguring them and perhaps devouring them tend mainly to dwell upon how much fun it would be and generally neglect the practicalities of the situation.

Hell, we make our own ifs. I had better things to think about than what could have happened

If they come upon one who still has not seen it and they speak to him of fire, he does not know what they mean. So they, in turn, fall back upon telling him what fire is like. As they do so, they know from their own experience that what they are telling him is not the truth, but only a part of it. They know that this man will never know reality from their words, though all the words in the world are theirs to use.

All roads lead to Amber, he said, as though it were an axiom.

Much of the world is illusion, yet the forms of that illusion follow a pattern which is a part of divine reality.

The entire universe is a revelation, said the monk. All things change, yet all things remain. Day follows night... each day is different, yet each is day. Much of the world is illusion, yet the forms of that illusion follow a pattern which is a part of divine reality.

Things pass, but the essence remains. You sit, therefore, in the midst of a dream.

To speak is to name names, but to speak is not important. A thing happens once that has never happened before. Seeing it, a man looks upon reality. He cannot tell others what he has seen. Others wish to know, however, so they question him saying, 'What is it like, this thing you have seen?' So he tries to tell them.