Quotes About Reality

It all goes so fast, she thought. We dole out our lives in dinner parties and plane flights, and it's over before we know it. We lose everyone we love, if they don't lose us first, and every single thing we do is intended to distract us from that reality.

Nur die phantasielosen flüchten sich in die Realität.

Die Welt der Kunst & Fantasie ist die wahre, the rest is a nightmare.

Die Welt der Kunst und Fantasie ist die einzig wahre. The rest is a nightmare!

Die Welt der Kunst & Fantasie ist die einzig wahre. The rest is a nightmare!

Life is not what we want but what we have.

It occurred to me that his words had a shadow. Or teeth and claws, and blood. Some kind of invisible whip. How words can be a trap, a trick and a net, not for butterflies or birds, or lions! The things that words promise.

Expecting something for nothing is the most popular form of hope.

Why should one exaggerate and distort things, if one does not feel disturbed and frightened by them? 'Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why then should we wish to be deceived?' says Bishop Butler, and thereby gives the best description of the serene and 'healthy' eighteenth-century sense of reality with its aversion to all illusion.

But the exponents of the theory "art for art's sake" maintain that any reference to actualities beyond the work of art must irretrievably destroy its aesthetic illusion. That may be correct, and yet this aesthetic illusion is not all, to produce it is not the exclusive or the most important aim of the artistic endeavor.

This decorum and etiquette, the whole self-stylization of the upper class, demand among other things that one does not allow oneself to be portrayed as one really is, but according to how one must appear to conform with certain hallowed conventions, remote from reality and the present time. Etiquette is the highest law not merely for the ordinary mortal, but also for the king, and in the imagination of this society even the gods accept the forms of courtly ceremonial.

the brave picture we have of humans as rational beings is utterly misleading, a kind of photograph of our surface composure and thus unreflective of-- and unattuned to-- the seismic emotional and psychic reality underneath, our true reality... The arts put onto the page or the stage or the canvas or the screen a special portraiture that does justice to our depths.

Well, how do you understand things or people? It is a question Shreve himself asks, and then answers by referring precisely to Sutpen's opposite number, the little dream-woman Rosa Coldfield: "What was it the old dame, the Aunt Rosa, told you about how there are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that maybe

You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

Whatever philosophers may say after the event the conviction that we live in an external world of things and persons, where events are more or less regularly repeated, has never been treated as a speculative conjecture about which doubt was a duty till truth was proved. Beliefs like these are not scientific hypotheses, but scientific presuppositions, and all criticism of their validity is a speculative after-thought.

science proceeds to build up a theory of nature by which the foundation itself is shattered. It saws off the branch on which it is supported. It kicks down the ladder by which it has climbed. It dissolves the thing perceived into a remote reality which is neither perceived nor perceivable. It turns the world of common sense into an illusion, and on this illusion it calmly rests its case.

An optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist fears this is true.

LEGGE DI HALDANE L'universo non è soltanto più bizzarro di quanto ci immaginiamo: è più bizzarro di quanto ci possiamo immaginare.

Death is the most normal, natural thing in life itself, and yet we are amazingly adroit at acting as if it were abnormal and a big surprise.

the average American considers the beginning of "old age" to be six years after the average person dies. We avoid thinking realistically about the length of our lives and our time left, lulling us into the false belief that we have all the time in the world.

For example, when asked in 2009 what "being old" means, the most popular response among Americans was "turning eighty-five."[2] In other words, the average American (who lives to seventy-nine) dies six years before entering old age.

Stein's law," named after the famous economist Herbert Stein from the 1970s: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

John Adams's maxim: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."1