Quotes About Reality

They say: "In the long run truth will triumph;" but it is untrue.

By poeticizing love, we imagine in those we love virtues that they often do not possess; this then becomes the source of constant mistakes and constant distress.

Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.

You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!

When one longs for a drink, it seems as though one could drink a whole oceanthat is faith; but when one begins to drink, one can only drink altogether two glassesthat is science.

In this way we will be reminded of their true nature and come to a more 'objective' judgement. It is, Marcus says, like: 'seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood. Or making love – something rubbing against your penis, a brief seizure and a little cloudy liquid.

Seneca has a wealth of such reminders: 'Everything is dangerous and deceptive and more changeable than the weather; everything tumbles about and passes at fortune's behest into its opposite; and in all this tumult of human affairs there is nothing we can be sure of except death alone.' Since there is 'no way to know the point where death lies waiting for you, … you must wait for death at every point'.

One of the most quoted Stoic sayings must surely be Epictetus' (which we first encountered on p. 39): 'People are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of things.

Mistaken about good and bad, unwittingly taken in by things that are ultimately harmful for us, we suffer from something akin to a perceptual illusion, only much deeper and more problematic. It's like the Müller-Lyer illusion: we can't help experiencing the lines as of different length, even if we know they're not.

Nothing was perfect, but everything was all right. The light was never just blue.

He looked at the gun. "Aren't you afraid?" "Of course I am," Anna said. "Of course I'm afraid. But that doesn't help." He shook his head. "No," he said, "it doesn't help to be afraid. Bad things happen anyway. You're right.

You can't change things. That's life. Poor stays poor, rich says rich, and those two, they will never meet.

They're the ones inside a soap bubble. Not me.

You don't understand at all. It doesn't matter what's true and what's a fairy tale. That's not what matters. The dividing lines aren't as straight and simple as you think. - Raka

Das Leben besteht leider eben nur selten auch aus Leben.

Madame Bovary, c'est moi. Emma Bovary. She was the first. The first to thrash around in the space between a packaged wonder and reality, trying to reconcile the two in her enormous, inarticulate heart. Madame Bovary, c'est toi, perhaps, dear reader. Madame Bovary, c'est tout le monde.

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined eternally to reenact their escape.

These terrifying forms which advance on me, I feel that the despair they bring is alive. It slips into this nucleus of life beyond which the paths of eternity extend. It is truly an eternal separation. They slip their knives into this center where I feel myself a man, they sever those vital ties which bind me to the dream of my lucid reality.

Where there is a stink of shit there is a smell of being.

I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself

All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it.

Alegremente" es la palabra de la casa. Estáis envenenados de alegría. Y no era eso lo que pensaba yo encontrar aquí. Creí que encontraría... a mis verdaderos compañeros, no a unos ilusos».

La objetividad será aquello que la razón discierne como naturaleza del mundo, cuyas figuras sucesivas son por eso mismo fenómenos o expresiones de un fundamento.