Quotes About Reality

Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion

Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind.

What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.

If your denial of death is sufficiently explicit and persuasive that you believe death isn't real, then what you deny isn't death but the significance of life.

But the reality of consciousness appears irreducible. Only consciousness can know itself—and directly, through first-person experience.

Consciousness is the one thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion--even if I'm a brain in a vat, all my memories are false, and my perceptions are of a world that doesn't exist, I'm still having an experience.

What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

My friend Joseph Goldstein, one of the finest vipassana teachers I know, likens this shift in awareness to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall.

I take seriously the idea that we're in a simulation. I have no idea whether or not it's true, but if it is, if we are in a simulation, it's not that nothing is real, not that there are no tables and chairs and trees. Rather, it's that they exist in a different form from what we first thought. There's a level of computation underneath what we take to be physical reality.

From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It's a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis.

Changing your perception of the world is often as good as changing the world.

to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall.

Every day after I wake up, I think, 'Wait... this can't be real; I'm still going to wake up.'

It's a nice bonus but, you know, I have to pay taxes too. (after winning the Grand Slam Cup.

The question of good and evil remains in irremediable chaos for those who seek to fathom it in reality. It is mere mental sport to the disputants, who are captives that play with their chains.

The strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

The greatest gift in life is the ability to think great thoughts and have the strength to take action so that those thoughts become reality in this wonderful and abundant world.

God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.

Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength, but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it.

Consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you.

Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.

You move totally away from reality when you believe that there is a legitimate reason to suffer".

It's the easiest thing in the world for a man to deceive himself.