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.

He thought he saw an Elephant, That practised on a fife: He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. 'At length I realise,' he said, 'The bitterness of Life!'

Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are acts more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking. It is no exaggeration to say that they alone are real, all else is unreal.

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Most women are not so young as they are painted.

If my fans think I can do everything I say I can do, then they're crazier than I am.

What I learned at a very early age was that I was responsible for my life. And as I became more spiritually conscious, I learned that we all are responsible for ourselves, that you create your own reality by the way you think and therefore act. You cannot blame apartheid, your parents, your circumstances, because you are not your circumstances. You are your possibilities. If you know that, you can do anything.

It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.

'The internet has no government, no constitution, no laws, no rights, no police, no courts. Don't talk about fairness or innocence, and don't talk about what should be done. Instead, talk about what is being done and what will be done by the amorphous unreachable undefinable blob called the internet user base.' (2004)

First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal.

Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one an temporarily evade reality ... but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.

Facts are stupid things - stubborn things, I should say. [Laughter]

Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.[2]

These things I say, and shall say, if I can, are no longer, or are not yet, or never were, or never will be, or if they were, if they are, if they will be, were not here, are not here, will not be here, but elsewhere.

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake - Aye, what then?

I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness. [p.200]

The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies. (Alternative models include the hundredth dune after the death of all camels, or the thousandth crevasse following the demise of all sled dogs.)

Whitman thought he was not abolishing beauty but generalizing it. So, for generations, did the most gifted American photographers, in their polemical pursuit of the trivial and the vulgar. But among American photographers who have matured since World War II, the Whitmanesque mandate to record in its entirety the extravagant candors of actual American experience has gone sour. In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist upon their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up - a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing - that 'it seemed like a movie.' This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was. While many people in non-industrialized countries still feel apprehensive when being photographed, divining it to be some kind of trespass, an act of disrespect, a sublimated looting of the personality or the culture, people in industrialized countries seek to have their photographs taken - feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs.

'For most people, self-awarness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. Its about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass'

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.

O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?

The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, 'You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.' The man replied, 'Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.' And they said then, 'But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are.'

The bees came booming as if they had never gone, As if hyacinths had never gone. We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy. This means Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.

I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil, and that is what our pictures attempt to do.

The era we are living in today is a dream coming true.

He who doubts from what he sees Will ne'er believe, do what you please. If the sun and moon should doubt They'd immediately go out.

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old, The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

From reveries so airy, from the toil Of dropping buckets into empty wells, And growing old in drawing nothing up.

Perhaps they were right in putting love into books... it could not live anywhere else.

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.

The play is done; the curtain drops, Slow falling to the prompter's bell A moment yet the actor stops And looks around to say farewell. It is an irksome word and task: And when he's laughed and said his say He shows, as he removes the mask, A face that's anything but gay.

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation'. Creative viewing.

Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.

The magical proposition of the gospel, once free from the clasps of fairy tale, was very adult to me, very gritty like something from Hemingway or Steinbeck, like something with copious ammounts of sex and blood. Christian spirituality was not a children's story. It wasn't cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into the dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment. Perhaps, I thought, Christian spirituality really was the difference between illusion and magic.

I've never seen a homeless guy with a bottle of Gatorade.

The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight... The truly wise person is color-blind.

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front -

It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, 'Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,' or 'Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.' They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complex picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority.

il n'y a pas de hors-texte

All of the buildings, all of those cars were once just a dream in somebody's head

Nothing is better than the unintended humor of reality

Writer: What, above all, I'm primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, that's it, really. I'm taking the pith out of reality.

To impoverish that reality whose inhumanity constitutes man's majesty is tantamount to impoverishing him himself. I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the same time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life, and yet I must carry it alone.

If we consider that all we deal with represents constantly changing sub-microscopic, interrelated processes which are not, and cannot be 'identical with themselves', the old dictum that 'everything is identical with itself' becomes in [today's understanding of the universe] a principle invariably false to facts.' (Note: Korzybski used '1933' to specify the current understanding. This editor has subsituted the 'more general' form: [today's understanding...])

It's lovely having grass and trees and flowers (Of course, at times, mosquitoes are a pest). Yes, life is life out here in Rangely Towers (Of course Some People like the city best)!

For want of the apparatus of propositional functions, many logicians have been driven to the conclusion that there are unreal objects. It is argued, e.g., by Meinong, that we can speak about 'the golden mountain,' 'the round square,' and so on; we can make true propositions of which these are the subjects; hence they must have some kind of logical being, since otherwise the propositions in which they occur would be meaningless. In such theories, it seems to me, there is a failure of that feeling for reality which ought to be preserved even in the most abstract studies. Logic, I should maintain, must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can; for logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology, though with its more abstract and general features.

Boards don't hit back.

What IS is more important than WHAT SHOULD BE. To many people are looking at 'what is' from a position of thinking 'what should be.'

Consciousness is much more of the implicate order than is matter.

O God! Can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?

When we speak of the commerce with our colonies, fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.

The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.

Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.

The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.