Quotes About Reality

Originally tragedies were bought on to remind us of real events, and that such things naturally occur, and that on life's greater stage you must not be vexed at things, which on the stage you find so attractive.

when things lay claim to our trust—to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them.

Everything you see will soon alter and cease to exist. Think of how many changes you've already seen. The world is change. Our life is only perception.

nothing is but what thinking makes it.

Harbour no such opinions as he holds who does thee violence, or as he would have thee hold. See things in all their naked reality.

How we think about God matters. It affects the credibility of religion in general and of Christianity in particular. Our concept of God can make God seem real or unreal, just as it can also make God seem remote or near.

I have been told that the German novelist Thomas Mann defined a myth (a particular kind of metaphorical narrative) as "a story about the way things never were, but always are." So, is a myth true? Literally true, no. Really true, yes.

To believe in a person is quite different from believing that a series of statements about the person are true.

the spirit of industrial society"—a way of living organized around production and consumption.7 Our modern preoccupation with producing and consuming leads us to live on the surface level of reality and to seek our satisfaction in the finite. But the sacred is known in the depths of reality, not in the manipulation and consumption of the surface.

In short, the portrait of Jesus as a Spirit person is history remembered and not simply history metaphorized. This is the basis for my claim that Jesus was a Jewish mystic: for him, God was an experiential reality. He knew the immediacy of the sacred in his own experience. And this claim leads to a second claim: Jesus' experience of God was foundational for the rest of what he was.

Many Christians basically accept the modern worldview's image of reality and then add God onto it. God is the one who created the space-time world of matter and energy as a self-contained system, set it in motion, and perhaps sometimes intervenes in it. God becomes a supernatural being "out there" who created a universe from which God is normally absent. This is, as we shall see, a serious distortion of the meaning of the word "God.

Jesus's vivid experience of the reality of Spirit radically challenges our culture's way of seeing reality.

To see the Bible as a human product does not in any way deny the reality of God.

At the risk of repetition, I mean that God (or "the sacred" or "Spirit," terms that I use synonymously) is a reality known in human experience, and not simply a human creation or projection.

Anthropologically speaking, they are delegates of the tribe to another layer of reality, mediators who connect their communities to the Spirit.

According to the verse, eternal life is a present reality, not simply a future one, and the content of eternal life is the experience of knowing God in the present.

how we see reality and our ability to trust are connected to each other.

The modern worldview yields a material understanding of reality. What is real is the space-time world of matter and energy. Reality is made up of tiny bits and pieces of "stuff," all of them interacting with each other in accord with "natural laws." The result is a picture of the universe as a closed system of cause and effect. Although this worldview has already been superseded in theoretical physics, it continues to operate powerfully in our minds.

Time obliterates the fictions of opinion and confirms the decisions of nature.

Esse quam videri - To be, rather than to seem (to be)

On the other hand, he was also enjoying the ecstasy of an idea, not daring just yet to envision its complications, dangers, and vicious absurdities. For now, the idea was enough. It was indestructible. Transforming it into reality, well, that was something else altogether. For now, though, let's let him enjoy it.

A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.

Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad , as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.