Quotes About Reality

Par l'imagination nous abandonnons le cours ordinaire des choses. Percevoir et imaginer sont aussi antithétiques que présence et absence. Imaginer c'est s'absenter, c'est s'élancer vers une vie nouvelle.

No, he is not a ghost; he is a man of Heaven and earth, that is all.

The Opera ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge. Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade. When

The Phantom: 'You know, Christine, I think I have hallucinations.

He had a heart that could have held the empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar

A false hope gives only false comfort.

Why do human beings have the peculiar impression that belief is the same as truth? Because sometimes the truth hurts. Sometimes we need to believe in a better truth. What better truth can there be than truth?

There is only one truth. Truth is absolute. You can't escape it, no matter how far you run.

It should not be possible for Christians to be disillusioned. We should have no illusions in the first place. Our faith is in Jesus Christ alone.

Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle science fiction.

Time turns our lies into truths.

Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. [...] We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.

She was staring at the low ceiling, and I had the feeling that there was another Severian there, the kind and even noble Severian who existed only in Dorcas's mind. All of us, I suppose, when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

Time turns our lies into truth

Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them.

Do you think there are answers to everything here? Is that true in the place you come from?

All time exists. That is the truth beyond the legends the epopts tell. If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind us?

The painting was of that irritating kind which dissolves into mere blobs of color unless it can be seen as a whole. I took a step backward to get a better perspective of it, then another … With the third step, I realized I should have made contact with the wall behind me, and that I had not. I was standing instead inside the picture that had occupied the opposite wall: a dark room of ancient leather chairs and ebony tables.

I, however, never suffered more than a sore throat and a running nose, forms of sickness that serve only to deceive healthy people into the belief that they know in what disease consists. Master Malrubius suffered real illness, which is to see death in shadows.

We are as solid as most truly false things are--a dance of particles in space. Only the things no one can touch are true...

The problem with fantasy is the greatest benefit of fantasy: it prevents us from living in the present moment. But the present now is different from the present then.

There isn't a someday. There never was. No one has ever been to the future that you keep putting your life on hold for. All we ever have is now.

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can't get fresh fruit in the shops.

Just so, lo, thus does it fare with us. For he who seems the wisest, by Jesus, is the greatest fool, when it comes to the proof. And he who seems the most honest is a thief. That shall you come to know, ere that I leave you, when I have made an end of my tale.