Quotes About Reality

The closer art reflects reality, the less artistic it becomes. Art is most enticing when it mimics life as a wolf dressed in sheep's clothing. The contrary is always a grave disappointment.

Reality is fatal whereas fantasy is something to die for.

Proximity to reality induces feelings of emptiness, horror and depression. Do not approach it alone.

Writers are liars trying to come clean. That's why the best ones are the most tragic.

So many dream of travel without having an idea of its reality: a language sounds exotic only when you don't understand it, and a culture appears better than your own only when you aren't in it.

Our most cultural state is one of total certainty—which is the reason those of us who are most certain are those who are most out of touch with nature (i.e., reality).

It is said that the depressive has a clearer view of reality than does the euphoric. Perhaps, but the euphoric has a clearer view of life.

There is nothing wrong with being fascinated by the dark side of life, and ourselves, but woe to those who think this is representative of reality. All too many of us sit in our homes watching TV, falling prey to the delusion that the world is getting worse. If these sorry individuals spent more time meeting their neighbors, they'd discover that 95% of their peers are fine people.

I can't approve of a private company that profits from algorithmic amplification, dissemination and micro targeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation that splinter our shared reality, poison social discourse and paralyse democratic politics... Pg179

There is strong evidence that given certain neurological conditions strongly creative individuals can receive a glimpse of an alternative reality where the world of normality is left far behind.

Birth and death are the two states that bracket our lives. One thrusts us crying into consensual reality from the Pleroma and the other ushers us back there at the end of life.

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

There is always an element of unreality, perhaps even of slight absurdity, about someone you love.

My patients brought me so close to the reality of human life that I could not help learning essential things from them. Encounters with people of so many different kinds and on so many different psychological levels have been for me incomparably more important than fragmentary conversations with celebrities

He understood these dreams as showing that the unconscious is the generator of the empirical personality and that the Self assumes human shape in order to enter three-dimensional reality.

Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.

The oddest consequence of Freud's theory is its implication that, if total sexual fulfilment were possible by means of complete adaptation to reality, the arts, including music, would become otiose. I have discussed the unsatisfactory nature of this conclusion elsewhere.

am sure that one of the reasons why music affects us deeply is its power to structure our auditory experience and thus to make sense out of it. Although I have been at pains to dispel the psychoanalytic view that music is an escape from reality or a regression to an infantile state, there is no doubt that music provides one path of temporary withdrawal from the hurly-burly of the external world.

we may say that reading Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, and Tolstoy enriches our understanding of reality, and therefore enlarges our capacity to enjoy life and enhances our adaptation to it. Shakespeare, Keats, and the other great poets reveal the inner nature of the world and sharpen our sensibilities because their perceptions and their gift for metaphor make it possible for us to transcend our own limited vision by sharing theirs.

But Freud, perhaps because he himself denies ever having had such an experience, treats it as illusory; whilst those who describe ecstatic feelings of unity usually portray them as more intensely real than any other feelings which they can recall.

Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.

More wisdom is latent in things as they are than in all the words men use.

He'd dethroned the king, married the princess, and taken over the kingdom. Did he really expect me to believe he'd done so ingenuously, blundering forward with a heart full of the best intentions? I think he did. What was more, in that moment at least, he seemed to believe it himself.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.