Quotes About Reality

But I wasn't inclined to go out of my way to defer to so many critics. I had a good grasp of reality and of my defects. I permanently kept in mind the approach of Death, who might at any time loom up before you.

But can thought wake you from the dream of existence? Not if it becomes a second realm of confusion, another more complicated dream, the dream of intellect, the delusion of total explanations.

yourself." "Yes," I agreed. "It has a specific kind of satisfaction, the bad of it guarantees it as real experience. This is what we go through, and it's what existence is like. The brain is a mirror and reflects the world.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

In every direction, the walls of life are tiled with such facts so that you can never account for them all, only note some of the more conspicuous ones.

And truth is true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion, and not truth.

But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it.

Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction.

Mind you, I'm a great admirer of our species. I stand in awe of the genius of the race. But a large part of this genius is devoted to lying and seeming what you are not.

Reality instructors. They want to teach you – to punish you with – the lessons of the Real.

As a man sees, so he is." The world as it appears to you classifies your mind.

Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.

One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it's wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it.

I pray for meaning. I pray for the limits of reality to become clear. For a world – and a type of being – that makes sense. I pray for a life after death that is not like this life. I pray for the end of mystery. What would a life be like with all the mysteries solved? If there were no questions, there'd be no stories. If there were no stories, there'd be no language. If there was no language there'd be no . . . What?

In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.

I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply there is a book.

Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.

Thus also every keen pleasure is an error and an illusion, for no attained wish can give lasting satisfaction.

GeçmiÅŸte kimse yaÅŸamad?, gelecekte kimse yaÅŸamayacak; her türlü yaÅŸam?n biçimi ÅŸimdidir; hiçbir kötülüÄŸün al?p götüremeyeceÄŸi bir mülktür bu.

The best any human can do is to pick a delusion that helps him get through the day

Men live in a fantasy world. I know this because I am one, and I actually receive my mail there

Reality is always controlled by the people who are the most insane.

it is not belief to say God exists and then continue sinning and hoarding your wealth while innocent people die of starvation. When belief does not control your most important decisions, it is not belief in the underlying reality, it is belief in the usefulness of believing.

Free yourself from the shackles of an oppressive reality. What's real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won't necessarily understand why it worked.