Quotes About Reality

it is improbable that you are not mistaken, but why should it be the truth?

Thucydides and, maybe, Machiavelli's prince are most closely related to me by their unconditional will to fabricate nothing and to see reason in reality—not in "reason," and still less in "morality" . . .

there are no moral facts at all.

Pascal is right to assert that if we had the same dream every night, we would be as engaged by it as we are by the things we see every day. "If an artisan were sure of dreaming every night a full twelve hours that he was king, I believe," says Pascal, "he would be just as happy as a king who dreamed every night for twelve hours that he was an artisan.

One must be prepared to sacrifice all desirability to truth, every truth, even plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth.?For such truths do exist

the one who had lost the world attains its own world

Sudovi, vrednosni sudovi o životu, za ili protiv, ne mogu naposletku nikada biti istiniti: oni imaju vrednost samo kao simptomi, oni dolaze u obzir samo kao simptomi - takvi sudovi su sami po sebi budalaštine.

The concept 'beyond', 'true world' invented in order to devalue the only world there is—in order to retain no goal, no reason, no task for our earthly reality!

At the moment when anyone begins to take philosophy seriously, all the world believes the opposite." —Human, All Too Human, "Assorted Opinions and Maxims

He who destroys the illusions in himself and others is punished by nature, the cruelest tyrant.

That is the greatest error ever committed, the most disastrous error on earth: believing that in the forms of reason, we had in our possession a criterion of reality, whereas we had them in order to gain mastery over reality, in order to misunderstand it in a shrewd way... — And behold, the world became false precisely because of the qualities which constitute its reality: change, becoming, multiplicity, opposition, strife, war.

We invented the concept 'purpose': in reality purpose is lacking.…

Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us—or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem?

Judgements, value judgements concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgements are stupidities.

Success has always been a great liar

Wir haben den Begriff Zweck erfunden: in der Realität fehlt der Zweck... Man ist nothwendig, man ist ein Stück Verhängniss, man gehört zum Ganzen, man ist im Ganzen, - es giebt Nichts, was unser Sein richten, messen, vergleichen, verurtheilen könnte, denn das hiesse das Ganze richten, messen, vergleichen, verurtheilen... Aber es giebt Nichts ausser dem Ganzen!

In Hinduism, the various forms of the divine are symbolized by numerous gods. Through their worship, the Hindu approaches the supreme Brahman, knowing, if he or she is intelligent and educated, that all these gods are ultimately identical. They are creations of the mind—images through which reality is approached. In science, their counterparts are the scientific models whose purpose is exactly the same: to convey something about reality which cannot be stated explicitly.

All things are forms of the same universal reality that is simultaneously spiritual and material. The whole cosmos is a unity and the whole cosmos is alive.

That is the trouble with a clear mind. For a little while you see things as they really are and you can accurately predict how they're going to shape the future ... and then suddenly you realize you've predicted yourself a week or a month into the future and you can't live the intervening time any more because you've already imagined it in detail.

I make no distinction whatever between reality and fantasy, or the objective and the subjective. All life and all awareness are ultimately one, including intensest pain and death itself. Not all the play need please us, and ends are never comforting. Some things fit together harmoniously and beautifully and startlingly with thrilling discords—those are true—and some do not, and those are merely bad art. Don't you see?

But disillusion is a healthy thing. It leads to reality.

That was another trouble with women, they were never there when you wanted or really needed them. They helped each other, all right, but they expected men to do all sorts of impossible feats of derring-do to prove themselves worthy of the great gift of their love (and what was that when you got down to it?—a fleeting clench-and-wriggle in the dark, illuminated only by the mute, incomprehensible perfection of a dainty breast, that left you bewildered and sad).

Of course not," Fay denied with a bright incredulous laugh. "Who'd want to loaf around in an imaginary world and take a chance of missing out on what his tickler's doing?—I mean, on what his tickler has in store for him—what he's told his tickler to have in store for him.

It's this way: the Big Time is a train, and the Little Time is the countryside as we're on the train, unless we go out a Door, and as Gertie Stein might put it, you can't time travel through the time you time travel in when you time travel.