Quotes About Reality

There are true unseen forces, but not nearly so many as we believe, nor would they rule us so sternly if we did not admit them to our souls. We would not be assailed half so often by devils, had we not taken the trouble to invent so many of them.

I don't think of death in a romantic way anymore.

The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.

All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.

How little do they see what is, who frame their hasty judgments upon that which seems.

How little do they see what really is, who frame their hasty judgments upon that which seems.

How learned and fine we believed ourselves to be! How shitty of the world to deal with us this way.

One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death.

One layer off from the deepest is a cartoon.

Dreaming is an advanced evolutionary exercise, a way the brain can go on an extended journey into that other reality.

To become enlightened is not just to slip into some disconnected euphoria, an oceanic feeling of mystic oneness apart from ordinary reality. It is not even to come up with a solution, a sort of formula to control reality. Rather, it is an experience of release from all compulsions and sufferings, combined with a precise awareness of any relevent subject of knowledge. Having attained enlightenment one knows everything that matters, and the precise nature of all that is.

A person can function normally in a million and one ways and hold the most irrational beliefs imaginable, as long as the irrational beliefs are culturally accepted delusions.

Denial is apt to be quicker than the truth, and so are well-rehearsed lies.

Robert W. Chambers

There was no real hearse. That was a soft-shell crab dream." She smiled faintly.

Most of us reject or manipulate our environments to avoid any emotional interaction that would contradict our early conception of reality, and this fact of human nature may be the single most delimiting factor for all psychotherapies

This admission is a fundamental step in changing the situation in the family. As long as the fantasy of love is maintained, there will be no real change.

Indeed, an honest acceptance of this fact would enable both parties to cope with reality without the additional defensive pressure. With a diminution of this pressure and the subsequent relaxation for both parent and child, they may even come to have genuine regard and loving feelings toward one another.

Since every member of the family has to conform to the illusions of parental or family love, this process also demands that the child distort his or her sense of reality and of the self.

It is a major thesis of this book that the fantasy bond in the traditional family causes a tremendous amount of innocent, unnecessary suffering. Denying primitive hunger and pain and pretending connections that, in fact, do not exist, lead to fundamental distortions of each person's sense of reality. It is a great burden on everyone to play this game of "let's pretend.

Believing the words of one's mate while ignoring the actions can lead to serious distortions of reality.

The purpose of the false self is to defend against pain - not deal with reality

As we look around at people, what they're doing with their children, with each other, with their wives, with their husbands, we see that most of their behavior is directed toward maintaining illusions and bonds.

Can stories as stories be true of reality other than that posited in the storytelling itself? Can Aristotle's criterion of a good story apply to nonfiction, as he himself did not think it did?