Quotes About Reality

We protect our minds by an elaborate system of abstractions, ambiguities, metaphors and similes from the reality we do not wish to know too clearly; we lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes

His gravest offence had been to accept the world in which he found himself as normal, rational and right.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.

Unmentioned, what is can become as though it were not.

One Reality, all-comprehensive, contains within itself all realities.

The firelight touches and transfigures her face, and we see, concretely illustrated, the impossible paradox and supreme truth—that perception is (or at least can be, ought to be) the same as Revelation, that Reality shines out of every appearance, that the One is totally, infinitely present in all particulars.

It is in the light of our beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality that we formulate our conceptions of right and wrong; and it is in the light of our conceptions of right and wrong that we frame our conduct, not only in the relations of private life, but also in the sphere of politics and economics. So far from being irrelevant, our metaphysical beliefs are the finally determining factor in all our actions.

There are times, and this is one of them, when the world seems purposefully beautiful, when it is as though some mind in things had suddenly chosen to make manifest, for all who choose to see, the supernatural reality that underlies all appearances.

Consequently, we find it convenient to be misled by the inadequacies of language and to believe (not always, of course, but just when it suits us) that things, persons and events are as completely distinct and separate one from another as the words, by means of which we think about them.

No holiday is ever anything but a disappointment.

And while you were paying attention to these things, you were momentarily delivered from daydreams, from memories, from anticiaptions, from silly notions - from all the symptoms of you. Isn't tasting me? ... I'd say it was halfway between me and not-me. Tasting is not-me doing something for the whole organism. And at the same time tasting is me being conscious of what's happening. And that's the point of our chewing-grace - to make the me more conscious of what the not-me is up to.

Thought is crude, matter unimaginably subtle.

Was and will make me ill, I take a gramme and only am. (Lenina)

Fui y seré me ponen triste ...; tomo un gramo (de soma) y sólo soy.

I took my [mescaline] pill at eleven ... I spent several minutes – or was it several centuries? – not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them – or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for I was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were they) being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.

There's nothing like a re-creation of the event. Which is lucky. Think if one could fully remember perfume or kisses! How wearisome the reality of them would be!

Liberation from prevailing conventions of thought, feeling and behaviour is accomplished most effectively by the practice of disinterested virtues and through direct insight into the real nature of ultimate reality. (Such insight is a gift, inherent in the individual; but, though inherent, it can not manifest itself completely except where certain conditions are fulfilled. The principle pre-condition of insight is, precisely, the practice of disinterested virtues.)

Te obiÅŸnuieÅŸti ÅŸi cu asta, repet? el. Cincizeci la sut? din consol?rile filosofiei în cinci cuvinte. Iar cealalt? jum?tate poate fi exprimat? în ÅŸase: când eÅŸti mort, eÅŸti mort, frate. Sau, dac? preferi, o poÅ£i exprima în opt: nici când eÅŸti mort, frate, nu eÅŸti mort.

Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them.

What is the mind? The question is, of course, ultimately quite unanswerable. We do not and we cannot know what mind really is. We do not and cannot know, of that matter, what anything really is.

That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.

back into the present, back into reality; the appalling present, the awful reality – but sublime, but significant, but desperately important precisely because of the imminence of that which made them so fearful.

They pretended they were trying to dissuade people from vice by enumerating its horrors. But they were really only making it more spicy by telling the truth about it. O esca vermium, O massa pulveris! What nauseating embracements! To conjugate the copulative verb, boringly, with a sack of tripes – what could be more exquisitely and piercingly and deliriously vile?