Quotes About Reality

At that moment Jack reached an insight, one he never forgot: a bee in a story could tickle worse than a real bee. He realized, too, that a story peach could be sweeter than a real peach, a story flower more fragrant than a real flower, a story song more melodious than a real song. What existed in a story could be more real than what existed in the world. And by reaching this insight, Jack understood the true power of his art.

I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it.

Just because you've made a couple movies, you've done some good movies, you've been nominated for some Academy Awards, whatever, nobody's entitled. It's a business. If they don't see it, I can think they're wrong, but I'm not entitled to a $15 million budget to make a film.

Looking down, the student exclaimed, "Look, there is a $100 bill on the ground." Without a glance down or a break in stride, Fama replied, "No, there isn't. If there were, someone would have picked it up already.

The great religions are also, and tragically, sources of ceaseless and unnecessary suffering. They are impediments to the grasp of reality needed to solve most social problems in the real world.

The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding: Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.

The best way to live in this real world is to free ourselves of demons and tribal gods.

The conflict between scientific knowledge and the teachings of organized religions is irreconcilable. The chasm will continue to widen and cause no end of trouble as long as religious leaders go on making unsupportable claims about supernatural causes of reality.

Someone has defined insanity as an inability to choose among false alternatives. In dreams we are insane. We wander across our limitless dreamscapes as madmen.

Art is the lie that helps us to see the truth.

People would rather believe than know.

Most truth's are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional and hope that the fiction lay at the service of a truth less richly represented by the original facts?

In my rather brief medical practice,' said David modestly, 'I found that people spend their whole lives imagining they are about to die. Their only consolation is that one day they're right.

Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case.

The moment we recognize an illusion as illusion, it ceases to be illusion and becomes an expression or aspect of reality and experience.

Doing, doing, doing!' cries the teenager. 'Why do I have to do anything anyway?!' Here, the adult is usually stuck for an answer. They know the usual answer, (you have to work to live) but the teen knows the reality… their parents are miserable from doing exactly this. Which is why, God has to come first... because that's where freedom is.

Our author envisions reality in terms of an eternal realm presently invisible to our earthly senses, and a temporary realm we can now see and touch but that will soon pass away.

All men think all men are mortal but themselves.

All men think that all men are mortal but themselves.

All men think all men mortal but themselves.

From dreams I proceed to facts.