Quotes About Reality

Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of Islam cannot interpret away this reality: hands are still cut off, women still stoned and enslaved, just as the Prophet Muhammad decided centuries ago.

Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn't make it easier.

When people say that the values of Islam are compassion, tolerance, and freedom, I look at reality, at real cultures and governments, and I see that it simply isn't so. People in the West swallow this sort of thing because they have learned not to examine the religions or cultures of minorities too critically, for fear of being called racist. It fascinates them that I am not afraid to do so.

Infuriatingly stupid analysts - especially people who called themselves Arabists, yet who seemed to know next to nothing about the reality of the Islamic world - wrote reams of commentary [after 9/11]. Their articles were all about Islam saving Aristotle and the zero, which medieval Muslim scholars had done more than eight hundred years ago; about Islam being a religion of peace and tolerance, not the slightest bit violent. These were fairy tales, nothing to do with the real world I knew.

Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see.

The mind that doesn't need any outer conditions for happiness is the mind that can say, "This is the release from all suffering. This is true happiness." Such a mind sees with clarity the absolute reality of what's happening in this universe and doesn't have to hang on to anything, attach to anything, doesn't have to become anything, doesn't have to be anything. It just does what is necessary at each particular moment and then lets go.

There is no future, there is no past. Everything is now, and we are completely transparent; we have no solidity. We only look as if we had.

It is not that we kill or annihilate something that actually exists; rather, we get rid of a deluded mind-state.

In addition to the emotive appeal of its eschatological promise, there was the tremendous attraction of Marxism as a cognitive framework for the interpretation of history and reality. With a largely justified reputation, Marxism functioned as a modern-day theology in the sense that it offered the best of minds a doctrine of very high level of intellectual sophistication with which to grapple, work, and identify.

As we have seen, the conceptual frameworks through which we comprehend reality are necessarily partial; and although not all propositions capture truth in equal measure, or are true at all, many of them may incorporate kernels of truth, offer suggestive perspectives, and illuminate reality from neglected angles.

Reason is still our signature tool for coping with a complex reality, yet it is easily subverted by overconfidence, cognitive closure, and biases.

Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.

Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.

Hope does not mean turning a blind eye to reality or living in self-neglect. It is about accepting the situation as it is and deciding to find a better way to deal with it. It's about showing up, even when you are afraid you may fail. It's about working through the tough stuff, the painful stuff, and still carrying on because you know you are stronger than you think you are. But of course, hope alone is never enough. You have to apply focus and persistence.

In Buddhism, consciousness is central because all phenomena are realized to be mere appearances to consciousness that have no independent existence.

Samsara is not out there, but rather in the way that we experience our environment. To target it precisely, samsara is in the quality of our minds. Our minds are not functioning in accord with reality, and therein lies the problem.

According to the general Buddhist view, the whole of sa?s?ra, with its myriad pleasant and miserable realms, is a prison. But from the perspective of pristine awareness, all of sa?s?ra and nirv??a is equally suffused by the primordial purity of the Great Perfection.

I suggest that if you were able to focus your attention at will, you could actually choose the universe you appear to inhabit.

There's no one-to-one correspondence between outer events and our inner emotional states.

One of the most persistent of all delusions is the conviction that the source of our dissatisfaction lies outside ourselves.

God, the soul, salvation, consciousness, love, free will, and purely spiritual causation may seem far more real to you than elementary particles and energy fields. I suggest that if you were able to focus your attention at will, you could actually choose the universe you appear to inhabit.