Quotes About Reality

Denial and hope, of course, are cousins. Bring them together, you've got illusion.

I'm more depressed about the realities of the mature bureaucracy and more excited about the ideal that we're fighting for. And the juxtaposition has obvious consequences. Rolf Mowatt-Larrsen

The [Bush] aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore...we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities [as] history's actors.

You know best who you really are by watching what you do rather than listening to what you say.

We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world -- mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.

?nsanlar iyimser define avc?lar? gibidirler, ruhlar?nda mücevher ke?feder dururlar. Oysa çak?l ta?lar?ndan ba?ka bir ?ey degildir mücevher dedikleri.

120 journées is a diabolically ingenious machine which simultaneously inverts the reality of Sade's situation and subverts the morality that justified it.

But why did Sade need so much brutality? Why not simply write hymns of praise to the orgasm, indulging his preference for anal intercourse by implanting similar tastes in his heroes? He was still using literature as a means of unpicking the past, inverting reality.

First, he lies to prop himself up, to make himself look better in other people's eyes than he is in reality. Second, Trump lies to be mean, to sadistically tear other people down and make them feel small.

Look, alternative facts aren't facts, they're falsehoods

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

To reach truth that one cannot be argued out of is to escape from the linguistically expressible to the ineffable. Only the ineffable—what is not describable at all—cannot be described differently.

Engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually … once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception.

We tell ourselves that a central project of law and political institutions is the reduction of violence, but this is mostly a fairly tale. Law and politics play a role in structuring violence, but rarely "reduce" it.

The solemn stillness of the morning hour lay over the pavement; above in the window panes the early gold of the young sun glistened, and high above swam little roseate clouds which then dissolved into the grey city sky. At that time, as a child, I firmly believed that "life", "real" life, was somewhere far away, beyond the roofs. Since then I have been travelling after it. But it is still hidden away behind the roofs somewhere...

L'acte le plus révolutionnaire est une vision claire du monde tel qu'il est réellement

Para vivir tenemos que narrarnos; somos un producto de nuestra imaginación. Nuestra memoria en realidad es un invento, un cuento que vamos reescribiendo cada día (lo que recuerdo hoy de mi infancia no es lo que recordaba hace veinte años); lo que quiere decir que nuestra identidad también es ficcional, puesto que se basa en la memoria.

Happiness, I do not know where to turn to discover you on earth, in the air or the sky yet I know you exist and are no futile dream.

One problem with gender-free terms, however, is that they sometimes obscure reality. Battered spouse implies that men and women are equally battered; this is far from true. Parent is too often taken to mean mother and obscures the fact that more and more fathers are involved in parenting;

Abstractions that we unwittingly treat as physical reality tend to block us from seeing the way things are, and therefore reduce our power to accomplish what we say we want.

Speaking in possibility springs from the appreciation that what we say creates a reality; how we define things sets a framework for life to unfold. A practice of this chapter and of the book as a whole is to distinguish between talk in the downward spiral and conversations for possibility. The question one asks is: *

The practice of the way things are is a reality check on the runaway imagination of the calculating self. It's like the world-weary policeman saying, "Just the facts, Ma'am, just the facts." Radiating possibility begins with things as they are and highlights open spaces, the pathways leading out from here.

Recognizing Pablo Picasso in a train compartment, a man inquired of the artist why he did not paint people "the way they really are." Picasso asked what he meant by that expression. The man opened his wallet and took out a snapshot of his wife, saying, "That's my wife." Picasso responded, "Isn't she rather small and flat?" 5

Being present to the way things are is not the same as accepting things as they are