Quotes About Reality

What is going to happen? Nothing. For everything has happened. All time is now, and time can do no better. Nothing can ever be more now than now, and before this nothing was. There are no minor facts in life, there is only the one tremendous one.

But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean. This may be the only thing in this world I know to be true.

Copper è venuto da me in sogno ieri notte. Non sembrava proprio un sogno. Potrei giurare che è venuto davvero da... be', da ovunque si trovi adesso, per farmi una visita». Chinò la testa verso di lui, sbirciandolo attraverso il fumo. «Ti sembra pazzesco?». Harmon alzò una spalla. «Non capisco come facciano gli altri ad avere informazioni riservate su certe cose, non importa quello in cui dichiarano di credere, o di non credere».

She had recently, though, had fantasies of what they called "going normal.

The truth is, Bob, they need those immigrants. Maine's been losing its young people—you and I are a perfect case in point. And the truth also is: That's sad.

You could buy a snow blower or a nice wool dress for your wife, but beneath it all people were rats scurrying off to find garbage to eat, another rat to hump, making a nest in broken bricks, and soiling it so sourly that one's contribution to the world was only more excrement.

She spoke mostly of her work with the ACLU, and I thought: She is not talking about anything real. And I think by that I mean that she was not talking about how she felt

I think there is no perfect way to live

You could buy a snow blower or a nice wool dress for your wife, but beneath it all people were rats scurrying off to find garbage to eat, another rat to hump, making a nest in broken bricks, and soiling it so sourly that one's contribution to the world was only more excrement.

Pam era convinta che fosse impossibile raccontare qualcosa in maniera fedele. Fragili parole sincere cadevano a casaccio sopra l'ampia distesa del tessuto di una vita, con tutti i suoi nodi e irregolarità.

We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end. A few weeks later I found out that William did not like watching me floss my teeth.

He took down the curtains that hung in front of the blinds and washed them in the old washing machine. In his mind they were blue-gray curtains, but it turned out that they were off-white. He washed them a second time, and they were an even brighter off-white.

Stupid — this assumption people have, that things should somehow be right.

I could not stop feeling that life as I had known it was gone. Because it was. I knew this was true.

We are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don't know it, that's all.

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind put into nature.

It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.

The great dream merchant Disney was a success because make-believe was what everyone seemed to need in a spiritually empty land.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

Plotinus was also the most relentlessly antimaterialist thinker in history. He taught his disciples that everything we see or imagine to be real is actually only a series of faded images of a higher realm of pure ideas and pure spirit, intelligible only to the soul. According to his student Porphyry of Tyre, he was even sorry that his soul had to live inside a physical body.

Second, Aristotle restores the reality, even the dignity, of the individual. Aristotle's forms, unlike Plato's Forms, do not exist separately from individuals. They appear only through the individual. We would know nothing about dogs without individual dogs in the world to observe and study; we would know nothing about justice without individual examples to examine and analyze.

For Plato, then, all certain knowledge requires an element of abstraction from concrete reality. Through Socrates, Plato tells us to constantly reach for the highest level of knowledge beyond mere individual examples, toward a universal standard for judgment that will give us a stronger, more confident position for acting in the world.