1,093 Reality Quotes

If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to. . . . The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

The entire universe - for one thing - only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality.

I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.

Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

In the meantime, it just makes it a little harder to smile. But so does the world.

I don't know where the artificial stops and the real starts.

There can be no immaculate conception of socialism.

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by Reality.

People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favour progress, provided they can have it without change.

Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover's mind if she knew the whole of it.

There is such a difference between life and theory.

Truth is a golden thread, seen here and there In small bright specks upon the visible side Of our strange being's party-coloured web.

A world where nothing is had for nothing.

All I want is a little more than I'll ever get.

Keep some souvenirs of your past, or how will you ever prove it wasn't all a dream?

This is serious: some of the things that are supposed to last the rest of my life are already wearing out.

I never miss reality when I'm not in it, but it's sometimes nice to come back to.

What could possibly be more fantastic than reality?

Why does merely attempting to understand Reality so often seem to lead to going insane?

My first line of defense against reality is called sleep.

It wasn't a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I'd spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.

A transition from an author's book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.

I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.

Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality?

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and the light but the shadow of God.

I believe in pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. I believe it is possible - I saw this guy do it once in Cirque du Soleil. It was magical.

I feel like I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe.

You can't have everything. Where would you put it?

'Comfort' is no test of truth; on the contrary, truth is often far from being 'comfortable.'

This earth is higher than all the heavens; this is the greatest school in the universe.

This is no world. It is God Himself. In delusion we call it world.

You don't know things anywhere! You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions!

Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that never has been.

'I'll follow him to the ends of the earth,' she sobbed. Yes, darling. But the earth doesn't have any ends. Columbus fixed that.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to. . . . The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

I am the angel of reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.

It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

Reality is the beginning not the end, Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega, Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. With the laugh comes the tears and in developing motion pictures or television shows, you must combine all the facts of life - drama, pathos and humor.

Nothing that we love over-much Is ponderable to our touch.

Madness is confusion of levels of fact... Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.

The eye- it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still; our bodies feel, where'er they be, against or with our will.

'If ignorance is bliss, then knock the smile off my face'

The image of ourselves in the minds of others is the picture of a stranger we shall never see.

And what 's impossible can't be, And never, never comes to pass.

It seemed the harmonious echo From our discordant life.

Reality, at first glance, is a simple thing: the television speaking to you now is real. Your body sunk into that chair in the approach to midnight, a clock ticking at the threshold of awareness. All the endless detail of a solid and material world surrounding you. These things exist. They can be measured with a yardstick, a voltammeter, a weighing scale. These things are real.

Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil. Nor can it identify itself completely with reality without denying itself.

How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Is human reason, then, without experience, merely by taking thought, able to fathom the properties of real things?

One thing I have learned in a long life: All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

Suffering is a sign that you're out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there's falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering points out that there is falsehood somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality when your falsehoods clash with the truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.

As a 28 year old who's lived long enough to know the difference, I know now that the feelings I felt at 16 were not necessarily correct. But however overly dramatic, the desperation and hopelessness I felt at 16 was my reality.

Some people say great God come from the sky take away everything and make everybody feel high, but if you know what life is worth, you will look for yours on earth.

Reality is apparent when one ceases to compare. - There is 'what is' only when there is no comparison at all, and to live with what is, is to be peaceful.

People deserve... the truth. They deserve honesty. The best music, you can seek some shelter in it momentarily, but it's essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change in world-view, at least for those who broadly share the world view I am presenting in this book. (Ch. 12)

Things we are accustomed to regard as myth or fairy story are very much present in people's lives. Nice people behave like wicked stepmothers. Every day.-'About the Author', The Many Worlds of Diana Wynne Jones, (HarperCollins, 2005). Retrieved June 14, 2005.

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.

The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: '[They] pray not only for [their] daily bread, but also for [their] daily illusion.' The rule seems to be that those who find difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.

No, by God, it is false! It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison - a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald. And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was true sunshine; the true music; the true splash of the fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me we were four people with the same tastes, with the same desires, acting - or, no, not acting - sitting here and there unanimously, isn't that the truth? If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?

All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable. The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive - you are leaking.

I couldn't get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn't last. I began to wonder what the minister meant when he said, 'God, the father, sees even the smallest sparrow fall. He watches over all his children.' That jumbled it all up for me. But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn't God. So at night, when I went to bed, I would think, 'I am clean. I am sleepy.' And then I went to sleep. It didn't keep me from enjoying the cleaness any less. I just knew that God wasn't there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.

Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.

The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. An attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached.

Evil is a radiation of the human consciousness in certain transitional positions. It is not actually the sensual world that is a mere appearance; what is so is the evil of it, which, admittedly, is what constitutes the sensual world in our eyes.

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life - the terror of art.

It is your mind that creates this world.

The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool's paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer 'Make me a healthy animal.'

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

I was quite surprised to find out all the places that he knew And so I asked the townfolk if his stories were true They said- Old John was born here, he's lived here all his life He's never had a woman, let alone a wife. And very soon you'll find out as you check around That no one named Corey's ever lived in this town So I chided the old man 'bout the truth that I had heard He smiled and said- Reality is only just a word.

Through art then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless.

[W]ords are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers. --Austin, Papers 182.

[H]owever well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction. --Austin, Papers 195.

Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality. They are more or less isomorphic to transformations of reality. The transformational structures of which knowledge consists are not copies of the transformations in reality; they are simply possible isomorphic models among which experience can enable us to choose. Knowledge, then, is a system of transformations that become progressively adequate.

Only a fool would refuse to enter a fool's paradise-when that's the only paradise he'll ever have a chance to enter.

The world accepts and follows the traditional approach. The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another; we mechanically follow somebody who will assure us a comfortable spiritual life. It is a most extraordinary thing that although most of us are opposed to political tyranny and dictatorship, we inwardly accept the authority, the tyranny, of another to twist our minds and our way of life. So if we completely reject, not intellectually but actually, all so-called spiritual authority, all ceremonies, rituals and dogmas, it means that we stand alone and are already in conflict with society; we cease to be respectable human beings. A respectable human being cannot possibly come near to that infinite, immeasurable, reality.

I'll tell you this - No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.