Quotes About Reality

As a child she had believed that wrongs would always be righted, that somehow the world would not let the innocent suffer, but now she realised that this was not true. Old oppressors were replaced by new ones, from another distant place or from right next door. Old lies were replaced by new ones, backed up by old threats.

The sight of such beauty can make us quiet with fear; fear that it might not be real, fear that it might be taken from us, as is everything that we love, which is only on loan to us.

What we have, we all must lose—that applied to everything, even to that which we thought we had the greatest right. We were tenants of this earth—nothing more.

people who believed not that the end was coming—as some people did—but that it had actually come, and we had simply failed to notice

La poésie: cette sauce dont on recouvrait la réalité pour lui donner meilleur goût.

But there were many things that one did not really believe that one did not want to disbelieve, just in case they might be true – which they clearly were not, of course.

You had to watch people—if you were not careful, all sorts of people would promote themselves well above their real station in life, causing nothing but confusion and uncertainty

the truth sometimes seemed too thin to satisfy our yearnings.

It was perfectly possible to portray scientific knowledge as socially determined – and therefore not true in any real sense – when one was safe on the ground in Paris; but would you ask the same question in a jet aircraft at thirty-five thousand feet, when that same knowledge underpinned the very engineering that was keeping one up in the air?

all those things that sound so right were often just poetry, really—the gravy we put on reality to make it taste a bit better.

love was a form of blindness that closed the eyes to the most glaring faults.

No, I mean it. People think that everybody has been involved with somebody else, whatever their nature. They find it inconceivable that one might go through life never finding anybody. But you know something, Caroline? I think that's far more common than you would ever imagine. There are plenty of people in that position.

How complex this world is, he thought; how easily may things appear to be one thing and then prove to be another. And how easy it was to see the worst

Penury was a matter of hard chairs and mean cushions; prosperity—old money—was a matter of feathers: an absurd reductionist view of it, but at times quite strikingly true.

how could anyone manage to negotiate their way through life's complexities without at least a smidgen of self deception here and there? Alexander Mccall Smith Precious and Grace.

Metaphors were so bloody: people shot messengers, flogged dead horses, cut the throats of their competitors. Perhaps that was life; perhaps that was what it was really like.

Light-minded society mercilessly persecutes in reality what it allows in theory

Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousands truths

Imaginary evil is romantic, varied; real evil is dreary, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.

represents their "death" to the world as they

Now I'd like someone to tell me there is no drama in real life!

All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face.

Ah, said the jailer, do not always brood over what is impossible, or you will be mad in a fortnight.