Quotes About Reality

the past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present. (...) we would seem forced to say that no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon. The universe does not 'exist, out there' independent of all acts of observation. Instead, it is in some strange sense a participatory universe

Recent decades have taught us that physics is a magic window. It shows us the illusion that lies behind reality—and the reality that lies behind illusion. Its scope is immensely greater than we one realized. We are no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, or fields of force, or geometry, or even space and time. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself.

Something like living occurs, a movementOut of the dream into its codification.

The horses Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks, "I'm a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me

Each moment / of utterance is the true one; likewise none is true.

But he that has been always free Can ne'er know the reality, The anguish and the wretched fate That is a part of thraldom's state. A thing, when we experience it, Makes evident its opposite. If bondage he has ever known, Then freedom's blessings he will own, And reckon freedom worth in gold More than the world will ever hold!

I wondered if they got to enjoy being normal, to know just how terrific it was, or whether it was just invisible to them like air?

Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.

To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.

Google is a global Rorschach test. We see in it what we want to see. Google has built an infrastructure that makes a lot of dreams closer to reality.

Our capacity for self-delusion appears almost infinite.

But all this means nothing. Gerda is not there. Only in my mind. The mind that is helped and solaced by the same demons, the same friends, who have destroyed the mind of an Iris who is close to me now, closer to me than ever, and yet far away. Walking in a dream, with Iris beside me.

Sport, truth, like art, is in the eye of the beholder. You believe what you choose and I'll believe what I know

That you are a worldly adult,' she said. 'You have spent your whole life letting go of the innocent dreams that made your childhood so warm and hopeful and full of certainty. Dream by dream you let them go. We all do it, to shield ourselves from disappointment. It's easy to shed them. Not so easy to get them back.

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)

A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn't the truth either. It's more like a fleeting, subjective impression.

A drawing of a tree shows not a tree but a tree being looked at

Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.

Most people, she said, can't stand the truth. It's too bad but there it is, most people can't stand it.

Clouds gather visibility, and then disperse into invisibility. All appearances are of the nature of clouds.

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

Oh, for once I was beginning to know the real truth! Man was born for slaughter!

a seat belt, smoke in public spaces, or "cross a public roadway while immersed in a virtual reality." Not that much of that sort of thing went on just yet, anyway. Black