Quotes About Reality

history is filled with fictional people. We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary - made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to.

There. You see? You're just figuring it out now, but I discovered a long time ago that the smarter you are, the more tempting it is to just let people imagine you. We move through each other's lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed. The popular jock. The mysterious new girl. But we're the ones who choose, in the end, how people see us. And I'd rather be misremembered. Please, Ezra, misremember me.

But I know now that isn't true; history is filled with fictional people. And even the epigraph Fitzgerald placed at the beginning of The Great Gatsby is by a writer who doesn't exist. We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary—made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to.

It wasn't the life I'd wanted, but it was the life I had, and I was finally starting to accept that.

Imaginary prisoners are still prisoners.

The life you pan isn't the life that happens again

We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary, made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to.

We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary—made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to.

I read somewhere that the hair and fingernails on dead bodies don't actually grow, it just looks like they do because the skin contracts as the body dries out. So it's possible to lie even in death, to deceive people from beyond the

discovered a long time ago that the smarter you are, the more tempting it is to just let people imagine you. We move through each other's lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed.

We mourn the future because it's easier than admitting that we're miserable in the present'...'Then maybe we're not mourning the future,' I said. 'We're mourning ourselves.

No era la vida que yo había planeado, pero sí la que tenía y, por fin, había empezado a aceptarlo.

All things look good from far away and it is man's eternally persistent childlike faith in the reality of that illusion that has made him the triumphant restless being he is.

It is better to choose to know the painful truth rather than settle on a comforting lie. Resolve to look for and to accept the truth, no matter how much it hurts. Nothing built on lies lasts.

Propaganda helps change the world by creating a false impression of the way the world is.

How did people keep hold of reality under communist conditions? How do they know not only what to remember but how to remember it? The answer was to create distinct small communities—especially families and religious fellowships—in which it was possible both to speak truthfully and to embody truth.

But truth cannot be separated from tears. To live in truth requires accepting suffering.

According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is.

The dictatorship of thought and word under construction by progressives is a regime based on lies and propaganda. Most conservatives, Christian and not, recognize that to some degree, but too few see the deeper ramifications of accepting these lies. "Political correctness" is an annoyance; these lies corrupt one's ability to think clearly about reality.

it is not by winning an argument but by keeping yourself grounded in reality that you carry on the human heritage.

It is difficult for people raised in the free world to grasp the breadth and the depth of lying required simply to exist under communism. All the lies, and lies about lies, that formed the communist order were built on the basis of this foundational lie: the communist state is the sole source of truth. Orwell said in Nineteen Eighty-Four: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."5

Santo Tomás de Aquino lo explicaba con este ejemplo: «saber que alguien viene no es saber que Pedro viene aunque sea Pedro el que viene». A través de la oración y la contemplación podemos, a partir de esta intuición, identificar a quien ahora solo vislumbramos. Por ejemplo, el anhelo de sentido y verdad que todos compartimos es, según David Bentley Hart, «simplemente una manifestación de la estructura metafísica de la realidad».

La nueva era derrocó el modelo aristotélico y cristiano del cosmos, que proponía una estructura jerárquica de la realidad en la que las cosas existían orgánicamente a través de su relación con Dios, y lo sustituyó por el de un universo mecánico regido por las leyes de la naturaleza, no necesariamente basado en lo trascendente.

Descartes defendía que el mejor método consistía en comenzar aceptando como verdaderas únicamente aquellas ideas que quedaban con claridad fuera de dudas. Ni la autoridad, ni tan siquiera nuestros propios sentidos deben hacernos aceptar una supuesta verdad. Solo son ciertas las cosas de las que podemos estar seguros. Y el primer principio de este método es «pienso, luego existo».