Quotes About Reality

You want to bask in your perfect marriage, with your perfect wife and kids, and gloat at the rest of the world! Dont you? And now you've found a flaw, you cant stand it. Well, stand it, Simon! Stand it! Because the world is full of flaws.

No, that can't be so.' 'Believe me, it is. All kinds of things you told them like sunsets are good and killing small birds is bad.' 'Oh please, may I have said something less banal. Please!

If he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is.' She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.

53. 'We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object'-this is the so-called systematic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love. But I am not willing to go there-not just yet. I believed in you.

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

You young people are always so obsessed with truth. The truth is often overrated.

There are no travellers now, only tourists. A traveller comes to see a reality that is there already. A tourist comes only to see a reality invented for him, in which he conspires.

Everywhere there are the politicians and the priest, the ayatollahs and the economists, who will try to explain that reality is what they say it is. Never trust them; trust only the novelist, those deep bankers who spend their time trying to turn pieces of printed paper into value, but never pretend that the result is anything more than a useful fiction.

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.

We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren't and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser.

Default to truth becomes an issue when we are forced to choose between two alternatives, one of which is likely and the other of which is impossible to imagine.

captures this poignancy in his memoir, which was published in 1942. He called it The Happiest Man. After numerous chapters brimming with optimism and cheer, the book ends with the sobering reality of Nazi-dominated Europe. Had The Happiest Man been published in 1945, when the

the actual experience of the thing that was feared is a lot less scary than the person imagined.

What happens to true believers when their convictions are confronted by reality?

The world - much as we want it to - does not accord with our intuition.

Here was the downside to Shirley Polykoff's world. You could get what you wanted by faking it, but then you would never know whether it was you or the bit of fakery that made the difference.

The powerful are not as powerful as they seem—nor the weak as weak.

Then he released on Cuban television an astonishing eleven-part documentary entitled La Guerra de la CIA contra Cuba—The CIA's War against Cuba. Cuban intelligence, it turned out, had filmed and recorded everything the CIA had been doing in their country for at least ten years—as if they were creating a reality show. Survivor: Havana Edition.

Goliath is not quite the giant he thinks he is.

The Consul looked at the sun. But he had lost the sun: it was not his sun. Like the truth, it was well-nigh impossible to face; he did not want to go anywhere near it, least of all, sit in its light, facing it.

Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.

An important lesson: Things that look like an overnight success usually aren't.

No amount of success - whatever that means, quote-unquote success - no amount of success replaces the reality of being separated from my family for this long.