Quotes About Reality

What is best in Freud is his sensing the paradox of being a highly social animal: being at our core libidinous, rapacious, and generally selfish, yet having to live civilly with other human beings—having to reach our animal goals via a tortuous path of cooperation, compromise, and restraint. From this insight flows Freud's most basic idea about the mind: it is a place of conflict between animal impulses and social reality.

Entonces, la idea es que todo lo significativo que vemos en el mundo es algo que nosotros sobreimponemos en él?». «Exactamente»

what we call the "self" is in such constant causal interaction with its environment, is so pervasively influenced by the world out there

Still, at a minimum it seems fair to say that the role of our conscious selves in guiding behavior is not nearly as big as was long thought. And the reason this role was exaggerated is that the conscious mind feels so powerful; in other words, the conscious mind is naturally deluded about its own nature.

Capgras delusion

Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.

el fracaso del marxismo no está en que haya sido mal aplicado a la realidad, sino a sus propias bases epistemológicas y gnoseológicas, por decirlo de algún modo, y al hecho de que Marx jamás pudo imaginar el potencial económico, tecnológico y democrático que encerraba el capitalismo, el mercado, la libertad.

El sueño del hombre nuevo se paga inevitablemente con el sufrimiento del hombre realmente existente.

Estoy muerto y quiero vivir. Esa es la verdad.

sólo el crimen puede afirmar mi existencia, como sólo el mal afirma la presencia del hombre sobre la tierra.

Siempre la misma vida: estarse reventando para nada. Decime, Rengo, ¿tiene sentido esta vida? Trabajamos para comer y comemos para trabajar. "Minga" de alegría, "minga" de fiestas, y todos los días lo mismo, Rengo. Esto "esgunfia" ya. —Cierto, Rubio, tenés razón... ¿Así que te animás? —Sí. —Entonces esta noche damos el golpe.

Y Erdosain remiró aquel rostro casi redondo, con laxitud de paz, y en la que sólo denunciaba al hombre de acción de chispa burlona, movediza, en el fondo de los ojos, y ese movimiento de levantar una ceja más que otra al escuchar al que hablaba. Erdosain distinguió a un costado, entre el saco y la camisa de seda que usaba el Rufián, el cabo negro de un revólver. Indudablemente, en la vida, los rostros significan poca cosa.

You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.

In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.

Reality is an AIDS-riddled whore.

When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.

I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn't really happy.

Life is shit, thought Pelletier in astonishment, all of it.

Isn't reality an insatiable AIDS-riddled whore?

I think of all those who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell.

Today I realized that what I wrote yesterday I really wrote today: everything from December 31 I wrote on January 1, i.e. today, and what I wrote on December 30 I wrote on the 31st, i.e. yesterday. What I write today I'm really writing tomorrow, which for me will be today and yesterday, and also, in some sense, tomorrow: an invisible day. But enough of that.

It's absurd to see an enchanted princess in every girl who walks by. What do you think you are, a troubadour?