Quotes About Reality

To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad thing come forth and experience themselves is awakening.

The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, expressed it well: Live, you say, in the present; Live only in the present. But I don't want the present. I want reality; . . . I only want reality, things without time present.3 And the Buddha

A healthy self and an empty self are not contradictory; it just appears so because we use the same language to describe two different things. The whole path of meditation is about understanding that the self as an unchanging entity is a fiction, an illusory mental construct.

We rarely see that "past" and "future" are happening right now. All that there is, is an unfolding of present moments. We have created these concepts to serve a useful purpose, but by taking the ideas to be the reality, by not understanding that they are merely the product of our own thought processes, we find ourselves burdened by worries and regrets about the past and anxieties of anticipation about what has not yet happened.

When you close your eyes there is the breath, sensations, sounds, thoughts—where is "man" or "woman" except as an idea, a concept?

From the beginning this "self" does not exist, yet because we're so firmly attached to the idea of it, we spend much of our lives defending or enlarging or satisfying this imaginary self. Meditation helps us to see its conceptual nature, to see that in reality it does not exist, that it is simply an idea, an extraneous projection onto what's happening in the moment.

Nothing we have, no one in our lives, no state of mind is exempt from change.

What do you do when it rains? The captain answered frankly. I get wet.

Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.

That crazy bastard may be the only sane one left.

Oh, they're there all right, Orr had assured him about the flies in Appleby's eyes after Yossarian's fist fight in the officers' club, although he probably doesn't even know it. That's why he can't see things as they really are. How come he doesn't know it? inquired Yossarian. Because he's got flies in his eyes, Orr explained with exaggerated patience. How can he see he's got flies in his eyes if he's got flies in his eyes?

Of course you're dying. We're all dying. Where the devil else do you think you're heading?

He woke up blinking with a slight pain in his head and opened his eyes upon a world boiling in chaos in which everything was in proper order.

There was no way of really knowing anything, he knew, not even that there was no way of really knowing anything.

Man was matter. Drop him out of a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage.

Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn't know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn't funny at all

The only thing going on was a war, and no one seemed to notice but Yossarian and Dunbar. And when Yossarian tried to remind people, they drew away from him and thought he was crazy.

Se trezi clipind din cauza unei uÈ™oare dureri de cap È™i când deschise ochii v?zu o lume clocotind într-un haos în care totul era în ordinea fireasc?.

Az eszmények jók, de az emberek néha nem olyan jók.

Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead

But she was a baneful person who spoiled my good days and rejoiced in my bad and who would never allow herself to extol or admire me or to view me as others did in the mythic dimensions of a hero king, or as a huge, monumental figure immortalized on a great pedestal of white marble. And that's another thing...

hands I could deny there were crab apples in my cheeks. Every time someone asked me why I was walking around with crab apples in my cheeks, I'd just open my hands and show them it was rubber balls I was walking around with, not crab apples, and that they were in my hands, not my cheeks. It was a good story. But I never knew if it got across or not, since it's pretty tough to make people understand you when you're talking to them with two crab apples in your cheeks.

Ideals are good, but people are sometimes not so good.

Joseph Heller