Quotes About Reality

Being human means understanding the reality around us not because God commands us to, but because that is what our mind does as part of its nature. The Augustinian and the Neoplatonist mind passively contemplates the world and waits for a connection to a higher truth to be revealed. Aquinas saw the mind as Aristotle did, as actively analyzing that world in order to forge those connections for itself.

But how do we do that? Especially since, as we have seen, the Forms do not exist in time and space, and none of us ever really knows them until we are dead.

The metaphor of the cave explains how this works. It occurs in Book VII of Plato's Republic, where Socrates describes the world around us as a darkened cavern, across the back of which a puppet show is flashed with the figures of men, animals, and objects cast as shadows. For a modern audience, the description has an eerily familiar ring. It's the world of television and the media at its most flimsy and superficial.

Common sense tells us that we can understand and navigate our way through that reality, and common sense tells us that the more we know about that outside world, the better we can act on it, both as individuals and as members of a community.

Aristotle's philosopher is always an observer of reality, not the creator of it. Instead of laying out the perfect blueprint, then turning reluctantly to the real world, Aristotle starts with the real world itself.

History teaches us what human beings are like in reality rather than what we would like them to be. And when we deal with the sum total of history's record, high-minded ideals like those of Plato's Philosopher Rulers have to be pushed off over the side. Reality teaches a very different set of lessons about politics—and Machiavelli's ambition was to present them to posterity

No, Ockham concluded, there is no common nature shared by individual dogs or men that we call by a common name. No universal exists outside the mind; everything that is real exists only as individuals. When I say, "All men are mortal," this is shorthand for saying, "Socrates is mortal," "Plato is mortal," and so on.

Ockham didn't use the term fiction to suggest that what we say about the world isn't true; just the opposite. Science deals with real life; and logic is the language of science. But we shouldn't mistake the logical gymnastics going on inside our heads for the reality going on outside. Science is about real things; logic, surprisingly perhaps, is not.

Diogenes's goal, he said, was "to deface the coinage," meaning strip away the false conventions on which society was built and expose the raw reality underneath.

Aristotle decided that Reality with a capital R is not (for the most part) something ultimately above or behind the world we see and hear and smell and touch. It is that world. What Plato had dismissed as the illusions of the cave, Aristotle set out to prove were the keys to ultimate understanding all along.

Reality turns out to have a dual nature. Yes, Socrates said, the world is one of constant change and flux: as Heraclitus said, that's the visible world around us. In Socrates's and Plato's terms, it's the world of Becoming. But there is also a realm of Permanence that Parmenides described, a higher reality that we grasp not through our senses, but through our reason alone. This is the world

His name was Parmenides, and in answer to Heraclitus's claim that everything changes, Parmenides countered by arguing that nothing changes. Far from permanency being an illusion, as Heraclitus claimed, it is change that is the illusion.

To be a human is to have a soul, Socrates and Plato tell us. Our soul is our true essence, our true identity. It is the soul that actively seeks to unlock the mysteries of the world, including the truth about reality.

Aristotle's bias toward observation and classification also led him to break completely with the concept of Plato's Forms. He did so not only because they seemed too abstract and logically unwieldy,13 but because they missed certain essential features of reality.

the key to happiness is understanding how the real world works. This idea stood in contrast to Plato-inspired utopian dreams, including John Calvin's Geneva (a favorite target in the Enlightenment). Our highest ideals are not reflections of some transcendent reality, Enlightenment thinkers argued, or some higher truth. They are just that, ideals: insubstantial playthings of the mind that can deceive as often as they can inspire.

So I have seen a man killed! An experience that, among others! Yes, I suppose I hav; although I can hardly be certain, And in a court of justice could never declare I had seen it. But a man was killed, I am told, in a place where I saw Something: a man was killed, I am told, and I saw something.

Ik weet niets van alchemie, maar ik zeg dit: zij zijn op de verkeerde weg. Het tastbare laat zich alleen door het ontastbare vormen. De werkelijkheid laat zich door niets veranderen dan door de geest. Om de dingen anders te maken hoef je ze niet aan te raken, je moet ze alleen anders zien.

Hij is er huiverig voor iets gewoon te vinden alleen omdat het door iedereen zo gezien wordt. Wie verzekert hem dat het perspectief zo meteen niet weer wisselt en hij al zijn verwachtingen opnieuw zal moeten bijstellen?

Een droom dat je niet toetst, wordt een desillusie

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Some of the greatest discoveries...consist mainly in the clearing away of psychological roadblocks which obstruct the approach to reality; which is why, post factum they appear so obvious.

Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.

The only atheism is the denial of truth.

So, day after day, he lived in the grey phantasmal world, akin to death, that has, somehow, with most of us, made good its claim to be called life.