Quotes about reality
page 24

“In other words, truth is simply what is: what exists in reality and can be verified by rational and independent observers.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 29

Truth

“Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Malraux and the Statues at Bamberg”, p. 191
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“I don't want to delve into the past for archeological pleasure - though it could have been that - but because the past has a reality which conditions us deep down. Then if you bring it slowly to the surface, it's full of possibilities.”

Jannis Kounellis (1936–2017) Greek painter, sculptor and professor of arts

Quoted in Kristine Stiles & Peter Howard Selz: Theories and documents of contemporary art (1996) P.670

Pleasure, Past

“Compared to the reality of everyday life, other realities appear as finite provinces of meaning, enclaves within the paramount reality marked by circumscribed meanings and modes of experience.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 25

Life, Appearance

“The subject is not just the theory of evolution, the subject is the reality of God.”

Phillip E. Johnson (1940–2019) American Law clerk

Hank Hanegraaf's "Bible Answer Man" radio program (19 December 2001)
2000s

God

“Strangely enough, many of the philosophical issues surrounding quantum mechanics are today being used to entice potential students into physics. As quantum computing and quantum communication become a commercial reality, tomorrow’s students may find themselves routinely grappling with the same philosophical questions that challenged their forebears almost a century ago.”

David Kaiser (1971) American physicist

Turning physicists into quantum mechanics (2007)

Communication, Question

“Now he was indifferent to all "questions" save that prime solicitude of the human race, how to hold its own against the hostile forces everywhere leagued against it. Life was a perpetual struggle, and, let dreamers say what they might, could never be anything else; he, for one, perceived no right that he had to claim exemption from the doom of labour. Had he felt an impulse to any other kind of work, well and good, he would have turned to it; but nothing whatever called to him with imperative voice save this task of tilling his own acres. It might not always satisfy him; he took no vow of one sole vocation; he had no desire to let his mind rust whilst his hands grew horny. Enough that for the present he had an aim which he saw as a reality.”

George Gissing (1857–1903) English novelist

Source: Our Friend the Charlatan (1901), Ch. XXVIII

Life, Hostility, Question, Indifference

“The reality is that we are dealing with the legacy of Apartheid. The economy of Apartheid was racially skewed and structured to take care of the minority, not the majority of the country. Everything you look at, be [it] the infrastructure, or energy, or economic […], it was all based on wrong and distorted ideology. When commentators comment on this matter of […] energy, they forget this and want to put the blame to a democratic government. … before 1994 there was a wrong belief that energy in South Africa was in abundance, … It was a mistaken view. It was because energy was made to serve a few. Immediately after 1994 when we had to grow the economy to the size of the population, … when we had to implement the constitution … and therefore rolled out […] electricity to the remotest areas of this country, suddenly we realised we don't have enough energy …, because we're now applying energy not in a false belief, but to [the] reality of the demand of the country.”

Jacob Zuma (1942) 4th President of South Africa

On 10 January 2015 at Cape Town Stadium during the ANC's 103rd anniversary celebrations, 2015, Year of the Freedom Charter http://www.sanews.gov.za/South-africa/president-2015-year-freedom-charter

Falseness, Country, Forgetting

“[U]p until now 'progress' has affected existing social realities only secondarily, modifying them as little as possible, according to the strict dictates of capitalist profitability. The important thing is that human beings are profitable, not that their lives be changed. As far as is possible, capitalism respects the pre-existing shape and contours of people's lives. Only grudgingly, so to speak, does it bring about any change. Criticism of capitalism as a contradictory 'mode of production' which is dying as a result of its contradictions is strengthened by criticism of capitalism as the distributor of the wealth and 'progress' it has produced.
And so, constantly staring us in the face, mundane and therefore generally unnoticed - whereas in the future it will be seen as a characteristic and scandalous trait of our era, the era of the decadent bourgeoisie - is this fact: that life is lagging behind what is possible, that it is retarded. What incredible backwardness. This has up until now been constantly increasing; it parallels the growing disparity between the knowledge of the contemporary physicist and that of the 'average' man, or between that of the Marxist sociologist and that of the bourgeois politician.
Once pointed out, the contrast becomes staggeringly obvious, blinding; it is to be found everywhere, whichever way we turn, and never ceases to amaze.”

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) French philosopher

From Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1 (1947/1991)

Life, People, Way, Knowledge

“It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.”

Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) American philosopher and logician

Theories and Things, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981
1980s and later

Science

“I never thought that I would be labeled something like Generation X because of that movie (Reality Bites). I had no idea going into it, and it wasn't a label I could relate to.”

Ethan Hawke (1970) American actor and writer

The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/14/movies/the-payoff-for-ethan-hawke.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all (2002-04-14) 2000&ndash;2004

Idea

“Both time and reality have always been regarded suspiciously in the Village, and various pharmaceutical concoctions are purveyed to those who wish to circumvent them.”

T. A. Waters (1938–1998) American magician

Source: The Probability Pad (1970), Chapter 1 (p. 7)

Time

“It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there — with your eyes open — and lived to see it.”

Anthony Bourdain book The Nasty Bits

The Nasty Bits (2006)

Love, Happiness, Way, Silence

“Like the paranoid schizophrenic, the vatic personality pretends to be talking about the grandiose outside cosmic world, but he is really talking grandiosely in symbolic ways only about his narcissistic self and his inner world. The mystic pretends to discard his sensory self in order to meld with the cosmic Self; but in discarding his senses he abjures his only connection with the cosmos and re-encounters only himself. The realities he expounds are inside him.”

Weston La Barre (1911–1996) anthropologist

Source: Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion (1972), p. 265

World, Way, Sense, Personality

“As the author describes it, it is the conversation of a “common man” with other common men. Intricate, distant and sacred questions of Religion, Reality, Dharma and Divinity are not for me. …. such has been my belief from the outset. It was not my good fortune to have had transcendental experiences, concentration on religious austerities, or the philosophical knowledge to qualify me for the exposition of abstruse problems.”

D. V. Gundappa (1887–1975) Indian writer

The Gita for Every Man

Men, Religion, Question, Knowledge

“The reality is that we're all in the wilderness, and we have to survive on our own, and things constantly change and if we don't accept that, then we're just trying to fool ourselves. But the beauty of wilderness is that sometimes you can wake up in the morning and feel so sweet and whole.”

Sophie B. Hawkins (1967) American musician

Quotations from SophieBHawkins.com

Beauty, Fools, Feeling, Change

“"You know that in all tombs there is always a false door?"
Renisenb stared. "Yes, of course."
"Well, people are like that too. They create a false door - to deceive. If they are conscious of weakness, of inefficiency, they make an imposing door of self-assertion, of bluster, of overwhelming authority - and, after a time, they get to believe in it themselves. They think, and everybody thinks, that they are like that. But behind that door, Renisenb, is a bare rock … And so when reality comes and touches them with the feather of truth - their true self reasserts itself."”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

(1945)

People, Truth, Thinking, Time

“The gist of Bell's theorem is this: no local model of reality can explain the results of a particular experiment.”

Nick Herbert (1936) American physicist

Source: Quantum Reality - Beyond The New Physics, Chapter 11, The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox, p. 199 (See also: John Stewart Bell)

“Watch the grown ups all twirling with the clock throughout the day. Watch them spinning through the hours while the time hands tick away. They talk and grip the world, as they would catch a falling knife. Reality deceives them ’neath amusing games of life.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Rhythm of Surrender"
A Different Drum (2004)

Life, World, Game, Time

“And the central assertion of his philosophy is that this inner realm is the 'spiritual world' and that once man has learned to enter this realm, he realizes that it is not a mere imaginative reflection of the external world, but a world that possesses its own independent reality.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision (1985), p. 161

World, Imagination, Learning

“In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent. The agony of the poor diminishes the rich, and the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich. We are inevitably our brothers' keeper because of the interrelated structure of reality.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)

Life, Men

“The path of the PROUN does not lie within the narrowly limited, fragmented, and isolated scientific disciplines — the builder consolidates them all together in his own experimental investigation. The path of the PROUN is not the incoherent approach of separate scientific disciplines, theories, and systems, but is rather the straightforward path of learned influence over reality.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Theses on the 'PROUN': from painting to architecture' (1920)

Lie, Learning

“Today kids are more advanced, smarter. When we came in reality show we were untrained in terms of facing television. That time TV was just starting out. We were nervous and shy. Today`s kids have seen it all.”

Shreya Ghoshal (1984) Indian playback singer

Talking about kids(2) http://zeenews.india.com/entertainment/musicindia/singers-today-have-more-space-and-work-says-shreya-ghoshal_132464.html

Time

“Since 1949, China has been temporarily divided, and each side of the Taiwan Strait is administered by a separate political entity. This is an objective reality.”

Ma Ying-jeou (1950) Taiwanese politician, president of the Republic of China

Ma Ying-jeou (2012) cited in: " President Ma delivers address at symposium on "1992 Consensus" http://english.president.gov.tw/Default.aspx?tabid=491&itemid=28543" in Office of the President Republic of China (Taiwan), 9 November 2012. Statement made during the 1992 Consensus Symposium in C. F. Koo Hall, Taipei, Taiwan, 9 November 2012. Strait issues

“In those countries, it is actually capital that rules; that is, nothing more than a clique of a few hundred men who possess untold wealth and, as a consequence of the peculiar structure of their national life, are more or less independent and free. They say: 'Here we have liberty.' By this they mean, above all, an uncontrolled economy, and by an uncontrolled economy, the freedom not only to acquire capital but to make absolutely free use of it. That means freedom from national control or control by the people both in the acquisition of capital and in its employment. This is really what they mean when they speak of liberty. These capitalists create their own press and then speak of the 'freedom of the press.' In reality, every one of the newspapers has a master, and in every case this master is the capitalist, the owner. This master, not the editor, is the one who directs the policy of the paper. If the editor tries to write other than what suits the master, he is ousted the next day. This press, which is the absolutely submissive and characterless slave of the owners, molds public opinion.
..
Yes, certainly, we jeopardize the liberty to profiteer at the expense of the community, and, if necessary, we even abolish it.
..
All my life I have been a 'have-not.' At home I was a 'have-not.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

I regard myself as belonging to them and have always fought exclusively for them. I defended them and, therefore, I stand before the world as their representative.
Speech to the Workers of Berlin (10 December 1940) (Wikisource)
1940s

Life, Men, People, Freedom

“Pornography takes all the reality out of sex and Disney does that to family life.”

Jarvis Cocker (1963) English musician, singer-songwriter, radio presenter and editor

Interview with The Big Issue magazine (2006)

Life, Family, Sex

“General systems theory is a set of related definitions, assumptions, and propositions which deal with reality as an integrated hierarchy of organizations of matter and energy. General systems behavior is concerned with a special subset of all systems, the living ones.
Even more basic to this presentation than the concept of "system" are the concepts of "space," "time," "matter," "energy," and "information," because the living systems which I shall discuss exist in space and are made of matter and energy organized by information.”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Source: Living Systems: Basic Concepts (1969), p. 51; Opening paragraph

Behavior, Time

“The world and the mind are states of being. The supreme is not a state. It pervades all states, but it is not a state of something else. It is entirely uncaused, independent, complete in itself, beyond time and space, mind and matter. (…) it leaves no traces. There is nothing to recognize it by. It must be seen directly, by giving up all search for signs and approaches. When all names and forms have been given up, the real is with you. You need not seek it. Plurality and diversity are the play of the mind only. Reality is one.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Reality
Source: "I am That." P.38.

World, Search, Time

“All the Hellenistic States had thus been completely subjected to the protectorate of Rome, and the whole empire of Alexander the Great had fallen to the Roman commonwealth just as if the city had inherited it from his heirs. From all sides kings and ambassadors flocked to Rome to congratulate her; they showed that fawning is never more abject than when kings are in the antechamber…w:Polybius dates from the battle of Pydna the full establishment of the universal empire of Rome. It was in fact the last battle in which a civilized state confronted Rome in the field on a footing of equality with her as a great power; all subsequent struggles were rebellions or wars with peoples beyond the pale of the Romano-Greek civilization -- with barbarians, as they were called. The whole civilized world thenceforth recognized in the Roman senate the supreme tribunal, whose commissions decided in the last resort between kings and nations; and to acquire its language and manners foreign princes and youths of quality resided in Rome. A clear and earnest attempt to get rid of this dominion was in reality made only once -- by the great Mithradates of Pontus. The battle of pydna, moreover, marks the last occasion on which the senate still adhered to the state-maxim that that they should, if possible, hold no possessions and maintain no garrisons beyond the Italian seas, but should keep the numerous states dependent on them in order by a mere political supremacy. The aim aim of their policy was that these states should neither decline into utter weakness and anarchy, as had nevertheless happened in Greece nor emerge out of their half-free position into complete independence, as Macedonia had attempted to do without success. No state was to be allowed to utterly perish, but no one was to be permitted to stand on its own resources… Indications of a change of system, and of an increasing disinclination on the part of Rome to tolerate by its side intermediate states even in such independence as was possible for them, were clearly given in the destruction of the Macedonian monarchy after the battle of Pydna, the more and more frequent and more unavoidable the intervention in the internal affairs of the petty Greek states through their misgovernment, and their political and social anarchy, the disarming of Macedonia, where the Northern forntier at any rate urgently required a defence different from that of mere posts; and, lastly, the introduction of the payment of land-tax to Rome from Macedonia and Illyria, were so many symptoms of the approaching conversion of the client states into subjects of Rome.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

The Changing of the Relationship between Rome and Her Client-States
The History Of Rome, Volume 2. Chapter 10. "The Third Macedonian War" Translated by W.P.Dickson
The History of Rome - Volume 2

War, People, Youth, World

“Becoming aware, awakening, enlightenment, is possible right here and now, for everyone. From moment to moment, and yet only here and now, never sometimes, somewhere. Reality, God, is present here and now. The kingdom of heaven, blessedness, moksha, nirvana waits here and now. Outwardly nothing may happen, and yet a purely inner process can open up a new world, a new life, a new reality. - New? - Yes, really new, and yet as all those who have ever experienced it assert, at that moment we know that we have always been at home in that world, although we only now become aware of it.”

Yrjö Kallinen (1886–1976) Finnish politician

Attributed without citation at Nonduality Salon Highlights, #1891 http://www.nonduality.com/hl1891.htm, 15 August 2004

Life, God, World, Home

“Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Associated Press interview (2003) http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3404272/ 2000s

Life, Knowledge

“Ascending modern rationalism, in its speculative as well as empirical form, shows a striking contrast between extreme critical radicalism in scientific and philosophic method on the one hand, and an uncritical quietism in the attitude toward established and functioning social institutions. Thus Descartes' ego cogitans was to leave the “great public bodies” untouched, and Hobbes held that “the present ought always to be preferred, maintained, and accounted best.” Kant agreed with Locke in justifying revolution if and when it has succeeded in organizing the whole and in preventing subversion. However, these accommodating concepts of Reason were always contradicted by the evident misery and injustice of the “great public bodies” and the effective, more or less conscious rebellion against them. Societal conditions existed which provoked and permitted real dissociation. from the established state of affairs; a private as well as political dimension was present in which dissociation could develop into effective opposition, testing its strength and the validity of its objectives. With the gradual closing of this dimension by the society, the self-limitation of thought assumes a larger significance. The interrelation between scientific-philosophical and societal processes, between theoretical and practical Reason, asserts itself "behind the back” of the scientists and philosophers. The society bars a whole type of oppositional operations and behavior; consequently, the concepts pertaining to them are rendered illusory or meaningless. Historical transcendence appears as metaphysical transcendence, not acceptable to science and scientific thought. The operational and behavioral point of view, practiced as a “habit of thought” at large, becomes the view of the established universe of discourse and action, needs and aspirations. The “cunning of Reason” works, as it so often did, in the interest of the powers that be. The insistence on operational and behavioral concepts turns against the efforts to free thought and behavior from the given reality and for the suppressed alternatives.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 15-16

Behavior, Effort, Universe, Appearance

“It has been a long time since I believed in Reality. I prefer the loveliness and the terror of my subjective experiences to those coldly scientific explanations which in the long run turn out to be no more real, and far less fun, than my own fantasies and musings.”

Sheldon Kopp (1929–1999) American psychotherapist

Source: Even a stone can be a teacher (1985), p. 20

Time

“Painting.... turned to the design of purely abstract volumetric forms... Since the leading exponent of the color theory was a painter (Malevich), he failed to recognize the objective reality of the world [in architecture! ]. Because he always looked at it only through his own eyes, he remained trapped in a world devoid of real objects. The broader implications of this had to be developed by us, the architects.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

Quote from: 'Basic Premises'
1926 - 1941, Rußland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion' (1929)

World, Color, Painting

“The time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruitless, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our sorrow.”

Samuel Beckett book Proust

Proust (1957), p. 4

Effort, Time, Joy

“If there is a single initial error at the root of all the difficulties philosophy is involved in, it can only be the one Descartes committed when he decreed, a priori, that the method of one of the sciences of reality was valid for the whole of reality.</i”

Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) French historian and philosopher

Methodical Realism

Error, Science

“We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Environmentalism as a Religion (2003)

People, World, Fear, Hope

“In the sublime imagination of the Beatific Vision, he catches a hint of a deeper reality, but why, he asks, this distinction between time and eternity? Can the apprehension of the Infinite Good be conditioned by the clock? Oh, for a knowledge undimensioned, untimed, effect of no cause, cause of no effect!”

Sister Nivedita book The Web of Indian Life

[The Web of Indian Life, Ch. X: The Oriental Experience, http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/wil/wil12.htm, 20 June 2012, Sister Nivedita]
The Web of Indian Life (1904)

Imagination, Knowledge, Time

“Religion is not a primitive type of scientific theorizing, any more than science is a superior kind of belief-system. Just as rationalists have misunderstood myths as proto-versions of scientific theories, they have made the mistake of believing that scientific theories can be literally true. Both are systems of symbols, metaphors for a reality that cannot be rendered in literal terms. Every spiritual quest concludes in silence, and science also comes to a stop, if by another route. As George Santayana has written, ‘a really naked spirit cannot assume that the world is thoroughly intelligible. There may be surds, there may be hard facts, there may be dark abysses before which intelligence must be silent for fear of going mad.’ Science is like religion, an effort at transcendence that ends by accepting a world that is beyond understanding. All our inquiries come to rest in groundless facts. Just like faith, reason must at last submit; the final end of science is a revelation of the absurd.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Sweet Morality (p. 226-7)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

World, Fear, Faith, Religion

“By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.”

Donald Ervin Knuth book The Art of Computer Programming

Vol. I, preface (October 1967) to the first edition. (p. x 1973, p. ix 1997)
The Art of Computer Programming (1968–2011)

Understanding

“When the underlying reality is particularly unpleasant, we minimize—numbing ourselves to the actual extent of the real story. We say, “Things can't possibly be as bad as people tell us,” because we don't want them to be that bad. This is a form of magical thinking, a way of shutting our eyes. Surely if things were that bad, somebody would do something about it. Withdrawal can take the form of removing our interest (another horror story about furry pets, yawn, yawn); or our wandering attention (understandably, since we are besieged by other equally pressing images of horror). Of course this reaction can be genuine: not everyone need become an activist in the cause to end animal suffering. And becoming a vegetarian may seem like going too far. In fact, it is not such a difficult step and could be legitimately seen as the very best form of activism.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: The Face on Your Plate (2009), Ch. 4, p. 161

People, Way, Understanding, Thinking

“The pleasure of their (the Imagist poetry is not the satisfaction of discovering little by little, but of seizing at a single blow, in the fullest vitality, the image, a fusion of reality in words.”

René Taupin (1905–1981) French academic

L'Influence du symbolism francais sur la poesie Americaine(de 1910 a 1920), Champion, Paris 1929 trans William Pratt and Anne Rich AMS , New York 1985 ISBN 9780404615796

Pleasure

“People die. That’s true in novels, and it’s true in life. Dying is one of the very few things we all do. To deny or ignore the omnipresent reality of death seems to me a disservice to human beings. That said, acknowledging in my novels that death exists does not make me a murderer any more than acknowledging that cancer can be treated makes me an oncologist.”

John Green (1977) American author and vlogger

Hey, some people on tumblr are wondering if writers feel upset or get a thrill when they kill their characters. Care to enlighten us?, John Green's tumblr, Tumblr, January 1, 2013, July 15, 2014 http://fishingboatproceeds.tumblr.com/post/39363824562/hey-some-people-on-tumblr-are-wondering-if-writers,

Life, Death, People

“Legally and to outward seeming the American President is the successor of Washington, and still enjoys powers devised and limited by the Convention of Philadelphia. In reality the new President differs from the Magistrate imagined by the Fathers of the Republic as widely as Monarchy from Democracy…”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

p, 125
The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

Democracy, Imagination

“In the providential history of mankind, Adam fell on the individual level; Noah fell on the family level; Abraham on the tribal level (clan level); Moses, on the national level; and Jesus, both on the national and worldwide levels. All those things are not a history of victory at all. But when we think of centering on the man Noah -- he kept his faith, trying to carry out his mission for 120 long years -- but we have to excel his faith. Abraham was the father of faith, Moses was a man of faith, Jesus was the son of man, trying to carry out his mission at the cost of his life. But they are, in a way, failures. So, in order for us to accomplish our mission, our whole-sided mission, we must excel them in many ways. It makes it difficult for us to carry out our mission; but when we pour out our whole energy, our whole being, into this providence project, we can get the cooperation of the spirit world, making it possible. We must turn all things upside down like this, making it a reality, and making it a success. Jesus had a strong sense of purpose in his mission, but ours must be even stronger than that.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

"Victory or Defeat" http://www.tparents.org/Moon-Talks/sunmyungmoon73/SM730331.htm (1973-03-31)

Life, World, Family, Faith

“My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialise the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision. - In order that the world of the imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident.... as that of the exterior world of phenomenal reality. - The important thing is what one wishes to communicate: the concrete irrational subject.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

The means of pictorial expression are placed at the service of this subject.
Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', p. 12

World, Imagination, Communication

““Myth, Symbol, and Tradition” was the phrase I originally wrote at the top of the page, for editors like large, cloudy titles. Then I looked at what I had written and, wordlessly, the words reproached me. I hope I had the grace to blush at my own presumption and their portentousness. How could I, if I lived for a thousand years, attempt to cover more than a hectare of that enormous landscape?
So, I let out the air, in a manner of speaking, dwindled to my appropriate size, and gave myself over to that process which, for lack of a more erudite term, I have coined the phrase “Thinking is linking.” I thought of Kerenyi — “Mythology occupies a higher position in the bios, the Existence, of a people in which it is still alive than poetry, storytelling or any other art.” And of Malinowski — “Myth is not merely a story told, but a reality lived.” And, along with those, the word “Pollen,” the most pervasive substance in the world, kept knocking at my ear. Or rather, not knocking, but humming. What hums? What buzzes? What travels the world? Suddenly I found what I sought. “What the bee knows,” I told myself. “That is what I’m after.”
But even as I patted my back, I found myself cursing, and not for the first time, the artful trickiness of words, their capriciousness, their lack of conscience. Betray them and they will betray you. Be true to them and, without compunction, they will also betray you, foxily turning all the tables, thumbing syntactical noses. For — note bene! — if you speak or write about What The Bee Knows, what the listener, or the reader, will get — indeed, cannot help but get — is Myth, Symbol, and Tradition! You see the paradox? The words, by their very perfidy — which is also their honorable intention — have brought us to where we need to be. For, to stand in the presence of paradox, to be spiked on the horns of dilemma, between what is small and what is great, microcosm and macrocosm, or, if you like, the two ends of the stick, is the only posture we can assume in front of this ancient knowledge — one could even say everlasting knowledge.”

P. L. Travers (1899–1996) Australian-British novelist, actress and journalist

"What the Bee Knows" in Parabola : The Magazine of Myth and Tradition, Vol. VI, No. 1 (February 1981); later published in What the Bee Knows : Reflections on Myth, Symbol, and Story (1989)

People, World, Hope, Art

“The strength of the imagination, its enriching power and excitement, lies in its interplay with reality—physical and emotional.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

Imagination

“Drawing is but a means to an end. One imagines that drawing can be beautiful-it is not the lines which are beautiful, but what they signify, the sentiments which they translate. In reality, there is no such thing as beauty in drawing, or color beauty lies alone in revelation of truth.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

RODIN, AUGUSTE. L'Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell, 1911

Truth, Beauty, Color, Imagination

“It is not in the resolution of problems that you will find happiness. If you want to find that happiness, if you want to find that joy, then find that one thing that is within inside of you. That is you, that is your reality, that is your core that can bring you that joy. This disparity has existed and existed and existed, yet people keep saying, 'No, these people don't know what they're talking about.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Auckland, New Zealand, September 10, 2000
2000s

Happiness, People, Problem, Joy

“The lesson is clear: estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage. […] The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Chapter 13, "Availability, emotion, and risk", page 138 (ISBN 9780141033570).

Death, World

“I hope.... to paint some in a lighter gamut, more flesh and blood, but, at the same time, I am trying to get a still stronger soft soap and copper-like effect. In reality I daily see, in the gloomy huts, effects against the light or in the evening twilight.... which I compare to soft soap and brass color of a worn-out 10 centime piece.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Nuenen, The Netherlands, June 1885; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 410) p. 31 1880s, 1885

Hope, Color, Light, Time

“Thought is just not something objective in our heads. Thought is power – real, objective power. Moreover, the thoughts we create have a life of their own. They have a kind of material reality that affects other people for good or ill – hence our responsibility to chose.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

The Power of Thought: A Twenty-First Century Adaptation of Annie Besant's http://books.google.co.in/books?id=SVKqq0dTdSMC&printsec=frontcover, p. backcover

Life, People

“Optimism is the parent of despair, while pessimism allows the mind to accustom itself to the inevitable disappointments of human existence by degrees, just as some drugs induce a state of tolerance. Pessimists, moreover, have the better sense of humour, for they have a livelier apprehension of pretension and absurdity. In a meritocracy, furthermore, those who fail must either indulge in elaborate mental contortions to disguise reality from themselves or sink into a deep melancholy.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

British Medical Journal Views and Reviews: Desperate house calls (BMJ 2009;338:b212).

Disappointment, Optimism, Parent, Sense

“For most men involved with a woman who is throwing off the traditional feminine harnesses and restrictions, her liberation has meant nothing more than greater involvement with household chores, child care, and support for the woman in her new career and academic aspirations. In other words, it has only added to his pressures, responsibilities and burdens, and stretched him thinner, without providing any obvious benefits in terms of greater freedom, mobility, expressiveness, security and satisfaction, feminist rhetoric notwithstanding. What feminists describe as beneficial to the man in these changes is an ideal—a potential rather than the reality of his daily existence.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

The Liberation Crunch: Getting the Worst of Both Worlds, p. 161
The New Male (1979)

Men, Support, Freedom, Change

“Rainer [protagonist in the novel], who is reading The Outsider by Camus, says he would like to put the hostility of the world behind him. Once your hope for something better is taken from you, then at last you have the present all in your hand. Then you yourself are reality. Others are extras. When Rainer contemplated san evening he says that evening is melancholy ceasefire where all life has come to and end.”

Elfriede Jelinek book Wonderful, Wonderful Times

53
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

Life, Hostility, World, Hope

“From this perspective, the common experience of the fading of romance over time may have less to do with the inevitable undercutting of idealization by reality and familiarity than with the increasing danger of allowing oneself episodic, passionate idealization in a relationship that one depends on for security and predictability. Intense excitement about another is a dangerous business; it often is much safer to surrender to it with a person one cannot possibly spend much time with or will never see again. Sustaining desire for something important from someone important is the central danger of emotional life. What is so dangerous about desiring someone you have is that you can lose him or her. Desire for someone unknown and unobtainable operates as a defense against desire for someone known and obtainable, therefore capable of being lost.”

Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) American psychologist

Can Love Last? (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), p. 114

Life, Business, Passion, Time

“Jerison argues that we should think of brains as creating a species' version of reality. …As brains enlarged through evolutionary time, more channels of sensory information could be handled more completely, and their input integrated more thoroughly.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

Thinking, Time

“"Non-fiction", on the other hand, declares itself to be the carrier of fact, an expression of reality, and thus of truth. Why then does most fact-based work have a remarkably short shelf life? The reply might be that additional facts come along. That we are learning all the time. In that case, it was never an expression of reality or truth. And even if the facts are overtaken, the arguments built upon them should not date with such terrifying rapidity. Decade-old serious "non-fiction" often seems arcane, irrelevant. The written style itself seems to become old-fashioned. Two-centuries-old decent "fiction" on the other hand can easily remain fresh.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

On Equilibrium (2001)

Life, Truth, Fashion, Learning

“There was a Christian redaction of the historical vision of reality, associated especially with the thought of St. Augustine of Hippo.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)

“As people become more aware of this universe as a quantum universe, it will embrace things like holographic entertainment experiences. Already, virtual reality and virtual interaction are an element of quantum fiction.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum fiction: Author Interview (2007)

People, Universe

“The good people of Iowa have debated issues ranging from nuclear Armageddon to universal health care. And then there’s 2016, when the top two Republican candidates in the dwindling hours before caucusgoers pick a nominee are throwing around this question: “How stupid are the people of Iowa?” It was Donald Trump who first raised the issue of Hawkeye State imbecility, in a mocking reference to a crush that Iowans had on Ben Carson last fall. And it’s the odious Ted Cruz who has been using Trump’s very words to goad Iowans into proving that they are not, in fact, so stupid as to back an ego-inflamed reality television star who makes fun of them.”

Timothy Egan (1954) American writer

How Stupid Is Iowa? (2016)

People, Health, Stupidity, Star

“Every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Letter to Benjamin Bailey (March 13, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

“My whole intention in painting is to make a thing poetical; but not poetical in a literary sense. I want something that evokes mood, a background, a stage set for certain characters that are playing certain parts. When I paint I do not consider myself an abstractionist in the sense that I'm trying to create beautiful forms that fit together like a puzzle. The things in my painting are intended to strike something that is an emotional involvement – that has to do with the human personality and all the mysteries of life, not simply colors or abstract balances. To me, it's all reality.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

Quote from An interview with William Baziotes, eds. P. Franks and M. White, Perspective no. 2, Hunter College New York (1956-57), pp. 27, 29-30
1950s

Life, Beauty, Color, Mood

“If there’s a singularity, would the resulting AI, or AIs, feel conscious and self-aware? Would they have an internal reality? If not, they’re for all practical purposes zombies. Of all traits that our human form of life has, I feel that consciousness is by far the most remarkable. As far as I’m concerned, it’s how our Universe gets meaning, so if our Universe gets taken over by life that lacks this trait, then it’s meaningless and just a huge waste of space.”

Max Tegmark book Our Mathematical Universe

Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)

Life, Feeling, Universe

“IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism=Sociology”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

Power, Politics, and People Boston: Beacon Press, (1963).
1960s

“Science has long been in the value business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best efforts to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument. This is how norms of rational thought are made effective… The answer to the question "What should I believe, and why should I believe it?"”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

is generally a scientific one.
Source: 2010s, The Moral Landscape (2010), p. 143–144

Question, Business, Effort, Science

“Veganism started off as a willpower challenge for me from vegetarianism. … I just walked into year three, so I'm still a brand-new vegan, but I've learned so much … and it's done wonders for my entire life. Some of the changes that I've experienced being vegan: I'm no longer anemic. … I don't get sick! And my skin is clear. I lost 30 pounds. … Everything in my life has benefited me just eating natural foods, and the more information about the truths and the harsh realities of treatment of animals as well as the process of manufacturing food or meat products—including seafood, including the dairy industry, which I was oblivious to being a vegetarian—prompted me to continue this journey, which I'm very proud of, but it's impossible to turn back, because I no longer see product—I see process.”

Mýa

“Mýa, Proud Vegan: 'I No Longer See Product—I See Process'”, video interview with PETA (12 October 2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rax-2smxzpk.

Life, Truth, Food, Nature

“Too many in Washington display a ruling class mentality and congressional term limits would go a long way towards restoring the citizen-legislator ethos of the Founding Fathers, Americans of all political background overwhelmingly support term limits, yet term limits have floundered in Congress. An approach that phases in congressional term limits reconciles the self-interest of members of Congress with the public–s desire to see these changes enacted and gives us the best chance to make term limits a reality.”

Ron DeSantis (1978) Florida politician

DeSantis Takes New Approach to Term Limits https://desantis.house.gov/press-releases?ID=CE85F6D8-D64B-4278-B99C-FF03D323DE2C (May 4, 2015)

Way, Support, Change, Chance

“Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Death, Pain, Fear, Nature

“Transcendence is the way God is immanent. God is present in every created reality, without being identified with it. This is the meaning of God’s transcendence.”

Kurien Kunnumpuram (1931–2018) Indian theologian

Kunnumpuram, Kurien, 2011 “Theological Exploration,” Jnanadeepa: Pune Journal of Religious Studies 14/2 (July-Dec 2011)
On God

God, Way

“Celebrating Gedderone’s Rite of Spring shouldn’t be an excuse to avoid the pressures of reality. It wasn’t just a harmless escape: it was a means of delaying the probable and making it inevitable.”

Steven Erikson book Gardens of the Moon

Source: Gardens of the Moon (1999), Chapter 11 (p. 344)

Spring

“I knew that the library was also the materialization of a certain level of the psyche, even as our world is. Only there, time is laid out like space is here. The windows of the library coincide with definite places in our space-time. In our world, these points of intersection may appear as natural objects, and these correlate with coordination points in your psyche. Moving toward these coordination points in your mind automatically lines up your consciousness to some extent with this other reality, and stabilizes conditions enough to allow for more or less conscious entry and return.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 41

World, Nature, Appearance, Time

“But the point, as I argued with Caplan, is not that managers are inherently less intelligent or capable as individuals. Rather, it’s that hierarchical organizations are—to borrow that wonderful phrase from Feldman and March—systematically stupid. For all the same Hayekian reasons that make a planned economy unsustainable, no individual is “smart” enough to manage a large, hierarchical organization. Nobody–not Einstein, not John Galt–possesses the qualities to make a bureaucratic hierarchy function rationally. Nobody’s that smart, any more than anybody’s smart enough to run Gosplan efficiently–that’s the whole point. No matter how insightful and resourceful they are, no matter how prudent, as human beings in dealing with actual reality, nevertheless by their very nature hierarchies insulate those at the top from the reality of what’s going on below, and force them to operate in imaginary worlds where all their intelligence becomes useless. No matter how intelligent managers are as individuals, a bureaucratic hierarchy makes their intelligence less usable.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

Homebrew Industrial Revolution (2010), Chapter 7.
Homebrew Industrial Revolution (2010)

Stupidity, World, Intelligence, Nature

“To talk about sensemaking is to talk about reality as an ongoing accomplishment that takes form when people make retrospective sense of the situations in which they find themselves and their creations. There is a strong reflexive quality to this process. People make sense of things by seeing a world on which they already imposed what they believe. In other words, people discover their own inventions. This is why sensemaking can be understood as invention and interpretations understood as discovery. These are complementary ideas. If sensemaking is viewed as an act of invention, then it is also possible to argue that the artifacts it produces include language games and texts.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1980s-1990s, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995, p. 15

People, World, Game, Idea

“it is a big challenge to localize a game of that size with voice acting in particular. But always, from previous titles in the series, actually being able to allow fans to experience The Legend of Zelda in their own language is something we really care about and something we've regarded as an important thing to achieve. Of course we have our localisation processes in place and having talented staff to work on that was very important, and we're very happy to have achieved that goal, so Zelda in various different languages will be a reality for fans when they play the game.”

Eiji Aonuma (1963) Japanese video game designer

The big Zelda: Breath of the Wild interview http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-boss-eiji-aonuma-on-the-large-extra-burden-of-moving-to-nintendo-switch (January 19, 2017)

Happiness, Game

“Our children are not us: they carry throwback genes and recessive traits and are subject right from the start to environmental stimuli beyond our control. And yet we are our children; the reality of being a parent never leaves those who have braved the metamorphosis.”

Andrew Solomon (1963) American journalist

Source: Far from the Tree, Ch. 1 Son, p 1.

Children, Parent

“What is important to me in my work is the identity that is hidden behind so-called reality. I search for a bridge from the given present tot the invisible, rather as a famous cabalist once said, 'If you wish to grasp the invisible, penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

In his public speech 'On my painting', for the exhibition 'Twentieth-Century German Art', London, 21 July 1938; as quoted in Max Beckmann, Stephan Lackner, Bonfini Press Corporation, Naefels, Switzerland, 1983, p. 77
1930s

“A reference framework is required in order to locate events in time and space. With some contractions and omissions, Figure 1.1 shows the conventional divisions for the classical and medieval periods. Even before the birth of the idea of nationality, it is quite acceptable to refer to specific countries, such as Greece and Italy, whose boundaries are well defined. It is also usual to refer to areas in which there is felt to have been some degree of cultural unity —— for example, the Roman Empire and Islam. Sometimes space and time are embraced by one image: the Roman Empire can mean either the first four centuries of our era or the area under Roman dominion. Used with care, these concepts have value for some historical purposes, but they can be very misleading. In the first place, we have to bear in mind the shifting of frontiers; in AD 750, for example, the Iberian peninsula was predominantly Muslim while Asia Minor was Christian — by 1450 the reverse was the case. Also, and this can be more serious, the conventional divisions are associated most closely with political and military realities, and often have little bearing on intellectual or social activities.”

Donald Hill (1922–1994) British historian and engineer

A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times, (1985), 1. Introduction.

Idea, Birth, Time, Country

“Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all Republicans have come up with is this slow down, stop everything, let's start over. You think you've heard these same excuses before, you're right. When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said, slow down, it's too early. Let's wait. Things aren't bad enough. When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted slow down, there will be a better day to do that. The day isn't quite right. When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone, regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today. More recently, when chairman Chris Dodd of Connecticut, one of the people who will go down as a chief champion of the bill before us today, said that Americans should be able to take care of their families without fear of losing their jobs, you heard the same old excuses, seven years of fighting and more than one presidential veto, it was slow down, stop everything, start over. History is repeating itself before our eyes. There are now those who don't think it is the right time to reform health care. If not now, when, madam president? But the reality for many that feel that way, it will never, never be a good time to reform health care.”

Harry Reid (1939) American politician

On the Senate floor, during a debate on health care reform, December 7, 2009 Reid Compares Health Reform Bill with Slavery, Suffrage - George's Bottom Line, abcnews.com, December 7, 2009, 2009-12-08 http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2009/12/reid-compares-health-reform-bill-with-slavery-suffrage.html,

Women, People, Health, Fear

“The most marvelous experience of life is to transform life according to reality, not imagination.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power

Life, Imagination

“Stellar wars are a sort of parallel reality in the filmic imagination, terrestrial wars are still today a harsh daily reality.”

Fausto Cercignani (1941) Italian scholar, essayist and poet

Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni

War, Imagination

“In reality, a person questioning the existence of the Satanic conspiracy is merely pointing out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. In that case, one can understand why the emperor's tailors get upset and suggest the person doing the pointing is a tool of the devil. Then the question comes down to one of whether the crowd will believe the evidence they have before them, or if they will buy into the tailors' fantasies.”

Michael A. Stackpole (1957) science fiction author

[Stackpole, http://members.tripod.com/~limsk/pulling.htm, "The Pulling Report", 2007-05-27]

Understanding, Question, Personality, Clothes

“Fulfilled philosophy vindicates our faith in the Personality of the Eternal Ideal, in the reality of God, by vindicating the reality of man the Mind, and exhibiting his legislative relation to Nature and thence to evolution. It thus secures a stable footing for freedom, and for immortality with worth, and thereby for the existence of the Living God who is Love indeed, because the Inspirer of an endless progress in moral freedom.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Limits of Evolution, p.54

Love, God, Faith, Nature

“The symbolic order is striving for a homeostatic balance, but there is in its Kernel, at its very centre, some strange traumatic order - the Thing. Lacan coined a neologism for it: l'extimité - external intimacy, which served as a title for one of Jacques-Alain Miller's Seminars. And what, at this level, is the death drive? Exactly the opposite of the symbolic orderL the possibility of the second death,' the radical annihilation of the symbolic texture through which so-called reality is constructed. They very existence of the symbolic order implies a possibility of its radical effacement, of symbolic death”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

the the death of the so-called real object in its symbol, but the obliteration of the signifying network itself.
147
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Death

“[Radhakrishnan describes the state of dejection he experienced as a student at Madras Christian College:] 'I was strongly persuaded of the inferiority of the Hindu religion to which I attributed the political downfall of India…. I remember the cold sense of reality, the depressing feeling that crept over me, as a causal relation between the anaemic Hindu religon and our political failure forced itself on my mind.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Radhakrishnan, 'The Spirit of Man', quoted in Rajiv Malhotra, Indra's Net, p. 316., 1st ed.

Religion, Feeling, Failure, Sense

“When an individual appears before others, he wittingly and unwittingly projects a definition of the situation, of which a conception of himself is an important part. When an event occurs which is expressively incompatible with this fostered impression, significant consequences are simultaneously felt in three levels of social reality, each of which involves a different point of reference and a different order of fact.
First, the social interaction, treated here as a dialogue between two teams, may come to an embarrassed and confused halt; the situation may cease to be defined, previous positions may become no longer tenable, and participants may find themselves without a charted course of action…
Secondly, in addition to these disorganizing consequences for action at the moment, performance disruptions may have consequences of a more far-reaching kind. Audiences tend to accept the self projected by the individual performer during any current performance as a responsible representative of his colleague-grouping, of his team, and of his social establishment…
Finally, we often find that the individual may deeply involve his ego in his identification with a particular role, establishment, and group and in his self-conception as someone who does not disrupt social interaction or let down the social units which depend upon that interaction.”

Erving Goffman book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Source: 1950s-1960s, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, p. 155-6

Appearance, Parting, Dependency

“Despite the heavy-handed subterfuges of "multiculturalism" and "diversity is our strength," the underlying reality is that within a few generations, any living culture will dissolve into an innocuous and half-remembered "cultural heritage" and the descendants of separate and even intransigent groups will become interchangeable consumers, voters, and employees. If they don't, they'll end up prisoners, and that also suits the empire of nothing.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 32
Becoming A Barbarian (2016)

“The computer's most profound aesthetic implication is that we are being forced to dismiss the classical view of art and reality which insists that man stand outside of reality in order to observe it, and, in art, requires the presence of the picture frame and the sculpture pedestal. The notion that art can be separated from its everyday environment is a cultural fixation [in other words, a mythic structure] as is the ideal of objectivity in science. It may be that the computer will negate the need for such an illusion by fusing both observer and observed, "inside" and "outside."”

Jack Burnham (1931) American art historian

It has already been observed that the everyday world is rapidly assuming identity with the condition of art. Jack Burnham (1969). "The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems" in Edward F. Fry, ed. (1970). On the Future of Art. New York: The Viking Press, p. 103; as cited in: Edward A. Shanken. "The House That Jack Built: Jack Burnham's Concept of 'Software' as a Metaphor for Art" http://www.artexetra.com/House.html in Leonardo Electronic Almanac 6:10 (November, 1998)

World, Art, Science

“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.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Corey's Coming
Song lyrics, On the Road to Kingdom Come (1976)

Life, Truth, Smile

“[I think] the movie is not a thing which is taken by the camera; the movie is the reality of the movie moving from reality to the camera.”

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic

from Los Angeles Free Press, March 22, 1968. Gene Youngblood

Thinking

“There is no need in these mathematical days to defend the use of symbolism. It is regarded by many schools of modern thought as the only safe form of language. Wittgenstein treats symbols as something more than conventional signs, and regards them as corresponding in some way to the reality to which they refer. He would probably accept Gurdjieff’s dictum that:

Symbols not only transmit knowledge but show the way to it.

Even though other thinkers deny any objective reference to symbols, no one questions that symbolism has a power beyond that of ordinary language. It is different with the language of myth. This is despised by superficial thinkers, but the greatest philosophers have known its value.”

John G. Bennett (1897–1974) British mathematician and author

Gurdjieff’s All and Everything (1950)

School, Way, Mathematics, Question

“Every false philosophy is an imagination of a world propitious to irrational demands and unregulated desires. The false philosopher's dream infects someone in closer touch than himself with everyday experience, this agent of his desire seeks to translate the dream into reality, and disaster follows. It is the Cinderella story in actual life. Rousseau was Robespierre's fairy godmother, Karl Marx was Lenin's, Nietzsche was Hitler's.”

Hugh Kingsmill (1889–1949) British writer and journalist

"Oscar Wilde's Fairy Godmother", The Best of Hugh Kingsmill (1973) p. 278 (1948)

Life, World, Dreams, Imagination

“The concept of law can be defined only as the reality tending toward the idea of law.”

Gustav Radbruch (1878–1949) German politician

Rechtsphilosophie (1932)

Law, Idea

“I'm more determined than ever that my husband's dream will become a reality.”

Coretta Scott King (1927–2006) American author, activist, and civil rights leader. Wife of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Statement soon after her husband's slaying in April 1968, as quoted in CNN obituary (January 31, 2006) http://www2.cnn.com/2006/US/01/31/king.obit.ap/

Dreams

“There comes a point when a dream becomes reality and reality becomes a dream.”

Frances Farmer (1913–1970) American actress

As quoted in "True Frances Farmer story remains elusive" by Rita Rose in The Indianapolis Star (23 January 1983)

Dreams

“The second point which must be part of the national goal, is caste less society. The constitution very clearly differentiates between Schedule Castes and Backward Classes. Why did out our Constitution makers make this distinction? They had something in their mind. Why have we lost that distinction today? I agree with you that reality is that caste accounts for a tremendous amount in this country. I do not disagree with that. But what is our goal? Is our goal a castless society? If out goal, is a casteless society, surely every step that we take must be towards that objective.”

Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) sixth Prime Minister of India

In Parliamemt in 1992, p. 31
Quote, Memorable Quotes from Rajiv Gandhi and on Rajiv Gandhi

Parting, Country

“A deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970), Chapter 2, page 253

People

“The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers… It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.”

Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) American Labor Leader[AFL]

Samuel Gompers, " Not Even Compulsory Benevolence Will Do http://books.google.com/books?id=3LVLAAAAYAAJ&dq=in%20reality%20the%20most%20potent%20and%20the%20most%20direct%20social%20insurance&pg=PA47#v=onepage&q=in%20reality%20the%20most%20potent%20and%20the%20most%20direct%20social%20insurance&f=false." The American Federationist. January 1917, p. 47.

“The Buddhist doctrine of impermanence includes the notion that there is no self… It holds that the idea of a separate, individual self is an illusion, just another form of maya, an intellectual concept that has no reality. To cling to this idea of a separate self leads to the same pain and suffering (duhkha) as the adherence to any other fixed category of thought.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Source: The Web of Life (1996), Ch.12 Knowing that We Know

Pain, Idea, Suffering

Quotes about reality page 24

Quotes about reality
page 24