Quotes About Reality

Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

I mean, I'm no superhero.

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.

If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.

Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things.

No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.

Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie.

which so incorruptibly reduced a reality to its color content that it resumed a new existence in a beyond of color, without any previous memories.

No one would dream of expecting a single individual to be happy—once someone is married, however, everyone is very astonished when he is not happy!

I don't invent you at sadly cooled-off places from which you've gone away; even your not being there is warm with you and more real and more than a privation. Longing leads out too often into vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when, for all I know, your influence falls on me, gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things ? Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

The main thing was to be living. That was the main thing.

It should either have passed away with my childhood, or my childhood should have flowed away from it later, leaving it behind, real among all the rest of reality, something to see and objectively tell, like a thing in Cezanne, incomprehensible for all I care, but tangible.

in later years it occasionally happened that I awoke in the night and the stars were so real and advanced so convincingly that I could not understand how people managed to lose so much of the world

And the expenditure of energy only seems so great because you put too much importance on the victory. It is not victory that is the 'great thing' you think you have achieved, though the feeling itself is not in error. What is great is that there was already something there that you were able to set in place of that deception, something true and real.

Here is the angel, who does not exist, and the devil, who does not exist; and man, who does exist, is in between them and, I cannot help it, their unreality makes him more real for me.

As coisas em geral não são tão fáceis de apreender e dizer como normalmente nos querem levar a acreditar; a maioria dos acontecimentos é indizível, realiza-se em um espaço que nunca uma palavra penetrou, e mais indizíveis do que todos os acontecimentos são as obras de arte, existências misteriosas, cuja vida perdura ao lado da nossa, que passa.

Do not suppose that I am smarting under disappointments. Quite the contrary. At times I am bemused to find how readily I relinquish all my expectations for the sake of reality, even when it is harsh. My God, if only some of this could be shared. But would it then be, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude.

am glad, in a word, that you have withstood the dangers of slipping into all this, and that somewhere you are living alone and courageous in a rough reality. May the year to come maintain and strengthen you in it. Ever yours, R. M. Rilke

The main thing was being alive. That was the main thing.

Without looking at a particular one, standing in the middle between two rooms, one feels their presence drawing together into a colossal reality. As if these colors could heal one of indecision once and for all.