Quotes About Reality

It also meant, however, that they couldn't drive without 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

Don't make it worse by thinking it's more painful than it actually is.

If there is one thing I've learned in more than seven decades of life, it's that the world is a completely fucked-up place. You never know what's around the corner and it's often something unpleasant.

It's essential to tell the truth at all times. This will reduce life's pain. Lying distorts reality. All forms of distorted thinking must be corrected.

To truly be committed to a life of honesty, love and discipline, we must be willing to commit ourselves to reality.

Chronically dysfunctioning families are also delusional. Delusion is sincere denial.

But the measuring up came first, not the love--don't marry for money, but marry where money is. Did men think like this? No, they didn't. They fell in love; then imagined that because they were in love, the girl would automatically measure up to their requirements too. They couldn't really love someone just as they were. And then when they found out that they hadn't got the person they had wanted--which was little wonder, since she'd never existed--the trouble started.

There's only so much to a lifetime and often it lets you down when you're best geared for going on.

Space, time, and objects might just be aspects of a sensory desktop specific to Homo sapiens. They might not be deep insights into objective truths, just convenient conventions that have evolved to allow us to survive in our niche.

Our conscious experience arises out of the laws of nature, the states of our brain, and our entanglement with the world.

we may just have to come around to the notion that there's my universe and there's your universe—but there's no such thing as the universe.

We can speak, think, refer to ourselves as agents, and so build up the false idea of a persisting self that has consciousness and free will.

Our brains trick us into thinking that we have Moral Truth on our side when in fact we don't, and blind us to important truths that our brains were not designed to appreciate.

The graphical desktop guides useful behavior and hides what is true but not useful.

Don't bother explaining—I've heard all the excuses and the trouble is most of them are true.

as though, capable themselves of suffering, they granted no reality to the suffering of others. 'The subject exhibited a pain response.' But not, under any circumstances, we hurt her .

Supposing you knew -- not by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know the truth of a mathematical proposition -- that what we call empty space was full, crammed. Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills and houses, but with things as real -- as real to the mind.

WE ONLY KNOW two things for certain: "I am," and "I will die.

He lied all the time even when there was no need to lie [...] He needed a _history_, a sense of self. [Burnside on his father, p. 22]

Sometimes, coming home in the early morning like this, I'd imagine things had altered while I was absent: a knife on the bread board that I didn't remember leaving out, a book face down on the table, a cup brimming with tea and dishwater in the sink. The evidence I wanted didn't need to be too elaborate or detailed. I could have constructed an entire afterlife from a half-moon of lemon rind or a small blister of jam on the tablecloth.

Betrug und Schönheit der Sprache bestehen darin, dass sie das ganze Universum zu ordnen scheint und uns zu der Annahme verführt, wir lebten in Anbetracht eines rationalen Raumes, einer möglichen Harmonie. Doch da Wörter uns von der Gegenwart distanzieren, weshalb wir niemals ganz der Realität der Dinge habhaft werden, machen sie die Vergangenheit zur absoluten Fiktion.

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is another.

We are too small, all but a few of us, to hold more than a little of the truth.