Quotes About Reality

Disturbance comes only from within- from our own perceptions. Everything you see will soon alter and cease to exist

The things which are ex­ternal to my mind have no re­la­tion at all to my mind.

The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.

Wherever you go, there you are—the same person, with the same patterns of thought.

everything which belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream

Remember: Matter. How tiny your share of it. Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate. How small a role you play in it.

This world is mere change, and this life, opinion.

If worldly things "be but as a dream, the thought is not far off that there may be an awakening to what is real. When he speaks of death as a necessary change, and points out that nothing useful and profitable can be brought about without change, did he perhaps think of the change in a corn of wheat, which is not quickened except it die? Nature's marvellous power of recreating out of Corruption is surely not confined to bodily things.

Thus thou must use to keep thyself to the first motions and apprehensions of things, as they present themselves outwardly; and add not unto them from within thyself through mere conceit and opinion.

The whole Universe is change, and life itself is but what you deem it.

Don't look at things the way wrong-doers do. Don't look at things as wrong-doers want you too, either. Instead, strive to see things in truth, as they really are.

Soon you'll be ashes, or bones. A mere name, at most—and even that is just a sound, an echo. The things we want in life are empty, stale, and trivial. Dogs snarling at each other. Quarreling children—laughing and then bursting into tears a moment later. Trust, shame, justice, truth—"gone from the earth and only found in heaven." Why are you still here? Sensory objects are shifting and unstable; our senses dim and easily deceived

Socrates used to call popular beliefs "the monsters under the bed"—only useful for frightening children with.

At all times, look at the thing itself—the thing behind the appearance—and unpack it by analysis: cause substance purpose and the length of time it exists.

36. Not to be overwhelmed by what you imagine, but just do what you can and should.

Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realising: 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. (6.13)

And moreover, to fear pain is to fear something that's bound to happen, the world being what it is—and that again is blasphemy.

At every instant the objects and events in the world around us bombard us with impressions. As they do so they produce a phantasia, a mental impression. From this the mind generates a perception (hypolepsis), which might best be compared to a print made from a photographic negative. Ideally this print will be an accurate and faithful representation of the original. But it may not be. It may be blurred, or it may include shadow images that distort or obscure the original.

still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.

The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

Remember that as it is a shame to be surprised if the fig-tree produces figs, so it is to be surprised if the world produces such and such things of which it is productive

that to expect a bad person not to harm others is like expecting fig trees not to secrete juice, babies not to cry, horses not to neigh—the inevitable not to happen. What else could they do—with that sort of character?

Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.

The universe is flux, life is opinion.