Quotes About Reality

The use of travelling," Doctor Johnson wrote Mrs. Thrale, "is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Our children remind us, if we let them, that there are not only many types of dreams but many levels of dreaming, that we do not have to go to sleep in order to dream and that when we imagine something vividly we are doing far more than 'making things up': we may be punching a hole in the world, opening a path into a larger reality.

life's a bitch, then you die

The number of portraits one saw of [Emperor Franz Joseph] was almost as great as the number of inhabitants of his realms…. Believing in his existence was rather like seeing certain stars although they ceased to exist thousands of years ago.

Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.

And what would you do, ... if you could rule the world for a day? I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality.

We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one's big and second toes; there's work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving.

And if some savage told us of a mag-ical worm that built a little windowless house, slept there a season, thenone day emerged and flew away as a jeweled bird, we'd laugh at suchsuperstition if we'd never seen a butterfly.

Our visual system does not simply reflect external reality but rather actively constructs it.

It has the funny kind of incomplete, semiabstract reality that scripts or scores have—they are programs, as it were, for real things in the world (the produced play, the performed music) that require adding a context, and decisions about that context affect the whole of the abstract object.

Instead of a fogged understanding, Austin suggests, we can attain greater insight into the mystery of our being – can, in fact, through the imaginative stories we tell ourselves, actuate increasingly improved contingent versions of human reality.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

The heart grows brutal from feeding on fantasies.

But someone I know is dying-- And though one might say glibly, "everyone is," The different pace makes the difference absolute.

There was a lot of joy to be had in the contemplation of a pint glass; in terms of plain reality of course, there was a deal more to be had in the draining of one.

As real as,' said Eddie. 'As real as what?' said Jack. 'Wish I knew,' said Eddie. 'But I can't do corroborative nouns. None of us are perfect, are we? I can get started. As big as, as obscene as, as foul as. But I can't get any further. But that's life for you again. As unfair as...

Science,' said Mr Anders Anders. 'Science, not magic. I told you before: when things are not as they appear to be, it's because they're actually simpler than you think them to be. Things are never as difficult and complicated as folk believe. You'd be surprised just how straightforward and obvious things really are. The secret is in knowing how to look at them the right way.

What is believed to be a fact is only a fact until another fact supersedes it. Science is only a fashion. Nothing more.

Reality isn't the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are. Either you acknowledge reality and use it to your benefit, or it will automatically work against you.

The basic idea underlying all the great religions is that man is asleep, that he lives amid dreams and delusions, that he cuts himself off from the universal consciousness (the only meaningful definition of God) to crawl into the narrow shell of a personal ego.

I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thru' it not with it.

Many of us are hurt emotionally, relationally, and spiritually, but because we are unaware of the extent of our wounds, we don't take steps toward healing and health. Our problem is not stupidity but a lack of objectivity. Because of this, we fail to see the reality of pain, hurt, and anger in our lives.

Sanity is a matter of consensus.

Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting.