Quotes about reality
page 3

“A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes a reality along with other realities—never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.”

John Steinbeck book The Pearl

Source: The Pearl (1947), Ch. III

“Every development of truths which relate to human nature, and more especially its active manifestations, is attended with a wish to see worked out in practice what theory has shown us to be just and good. To man, whose mind is seldom satisfied with the calmly beneficent influence of abstract ideas, this desire is perfectly natural, and it increases in liveliness with the spirit of benevolent sympathy in social happiness and well-being. But, however natural in itself, and however noble in its origin, this desire has not unfrequently led to hurtful consequences,—nay, often to greater evils than the colder indifference, or (as from the very opposite cause the same effect may follow) the glowing enthusiasm, which, comparatively heedless of reality, delights only in the pure beauty of ideas.”

Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835) German (Prussian) philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the University of Berlin

Source: The Limits of State Action (1792), Ch. 16

Happiness, Truth, Beauty, Idea

“Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought.... life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.”

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) Brazilian writer

The Passion According to G.H. (1964), p. 169

Love, Life, Silence

“Calvin’s theocentric irrationalism eventually revealed itself as the cunning to technocratic reason which had to shape its human material. Misery and the poor laws did not suffice to drive men into the workshops of the early capitalistic era. The new spirit helped to supplement external pressures with a concern for wife and child to which the moral autonomy of the introverted subject in reality was tantamount.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The End of Reason" (1941), p. 34.

Men, Law, Help

“However—the crucial thing is my lack of interest in ordinary life. No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it—and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order… defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law… are concerned. Just why this is so I haven't the slightest idea—it simply is so. I am interested only in broad pageants—historic streams—orders of biological, chemical, physical, and astronomical organisation—and the only conflict which has any deep emotional significance to me is that of the principle of freedom or irregularity or adventurous opportunity against the eternal and maddening rigidity of cosmic law… especially the laws of time…. Hence the type of thing I try to write. Naturally, I am aware that this forms a very limited special field so far as mankind en masse is concerned; but I believe (as pointed out in that Recluse article) that the field is an authentic one despite its subordinate nature. This protest against natural law, and tendency to weave visions of escape from orderly nature, are characteristic and eternal factors in human psychology, even though very small ones. They exist as permanent realities, and have always expressed themselves in a typical form of art from the earliest fireside folk tales and ballads to the latest achievements of Blackwood and Machen or de la Mare or Dunsany. That art exists—whether the majority like it or not. It is small and limited, but real—and there is no reason why its practitioners should be ashamed of it. Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience—but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to E. Hoffmann Price (15 August 1934) , quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S.T. Joshi, p. 268
Non-Fiction, Letters, to E. Hoffmann Price

Life, Law, Beauty, Art

“A social world [is] a comprehensive and given reality confronting the individual in a manner analogous to the reality of the natural world… In early phases of socialization the child is quite incapable of distinguishing between the objectivity of natural phenomena and the objectivity of the social formations… The objective reality of institutions is not diminished if the individual does not understand their purpose or their mode of operation…He must ‘go out’ and learn about them, just as he must learn about nature.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 59-61

World, Understanding, Nature, Learning

“One may view the individual’s everyday life in terms of the working away of a conversational apparatus that ongoingly maintains, modifies and reconstructs his subjective reality… [for example] ‘Well, it’s time for me to get to the station,’ and ‘Fine, darling, have a good day at the office’ implies an entire world within which these apparently simple propositions make sense… the exchange confirms the subjective reality of this world… the great part, if not all, of everyday conversation maintains subjective reality… imagine the effect…of an exchange like this: ‘Well, it’s time for me to get to the station,’ ‘Fine, darling, don’t forget to take along your gun.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 147-163

Life, World, Imagination, Sense

“In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing "unreal" is to be admitted. But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that, in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1910s, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), Ch. 16: Descriptions

Error, Feeling, Sense

“The very fact that religions are not content to stand on their own feet, but insist on crippling or warping the flexible minds of children in their favour, forms a sufficient proof that there is no truth in them. If there were any truth in religion, it would be even more acceptable to a mature mind than to an infant mind—yet no mature mind ever accepts religion unless it has been crippled in infancy. … The whole basis of religion is a symbolic emotionalism which modern knowledge has rendered meaningless & even unhealthy. Today we know that the cosmos is simply a flux of purposeless rearrangement amidst which man is a wholly negligible incident or accident. There is no reason why it should be otherwise, or why we should wish it otherwise. All the florid romancing about man's "dignity", "immortality", &c. &c. is simply egotistical delusions plus primitive ignorance. So, too, are the infantile concepts of "sin" or cosmic "right" & "wrong". Actually, organic life on our planet is simply a momentary spark of no importance or meaning whatsoever. Man matters to nobody except himself. Nor are his "noble" imaginative concepts any proof of the objective reality of the things they visualise. Psychologists understand how these concepts are built up out of fragments of experience, instinct, & misapprehension. Man is essentially a machine of a very complex sort, as La Mettrie recognised nearly 2 centuries ago. He arises through certain typical chemical & physical reactions, & his members gradually break down into their constituent parts & vanish from existence. The idea of personal "immortality" is merely the dream of a child or savage. However, there is nothing anti-ethical or anti-social in such a realistic view of things. Although meaning nothing in the cosmos as a whole, mankind obviously means a good deal to itself. Therefore it must be regulated by customs which shall ensure, for its own benefit, the full development of its various accidental potentialities. It has a fortuitous jumble of reactions, some of which it instinctively seeks to heighten & prolong, & some of which it instinctively seeks to shorten or lessen. Also, we see that certain courses of action tend to increase its radius of comprehension & degree of specialised organisation (things usually promoting the wished-for reactions, & in general removing the species from a clod-like, unorganised state), while other courses of action tend to exert an opposite effect. Now since man means nothing to the cosmos, it is plan that his only logical goal (a goal whose sole reference is to himself) is simply the achievement of a reasonable equilibrium which shall enhance his likelihood of experiencing the sort of reactions he wishes, & which shall help along his natural impulse to increase his differentiation from unorganised force & matter. This goal can be reached only through teaching individual men how best to keep out of each other's way, & how best to reconcile the various conflicting instincts which a haphazard cosmic drift has placed within the breast of the same person. Here, then, is a practical & imperative system of ethics, resting on the firmest possible foundation & being essentially that taught by Epicurus & Lucretius. It has no need of supernatualism, & indeed has nothing to do with it.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Natalie H. Wooley (2 May 1936), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 240-241
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, Men, Children, Truth

“For he considered that, in many cases, but especially in war, mere appearances have had all the effect of realities; and that a person, under a firm persuasion that he can command resources, virtually has them; that very prospect inspiring him with hope and boldness in his exertions.”

Livy (-59–17 BC) Roman historian

Book XXXIV, sec. 12 http://books.google.com/books?id=5f08AAAAYAAJ&q=&quot;For+he+considered+that+in+many+cases+but+especially+in+war+mere+appearances+have+had+all+the+effect+of+realities+and+that+a+person+under+a+firm+persuasion+that+he+can+command+resources+virtually+has+them+that+very+prospect+inspiring+him+with+hope+and+boldness+in+his+exertions&quot;&pg=PA443#v=onepage <br class="br">History of Rome

War, Hope, Appearance, Personality

“Age after age, history repeats itself when men and women, in their ignorance, limitations and pride, sit in judgment over the God-incarnated man who declares his Godhood, and condemn him for uttering the Truths they cannot understand. He is indifferent to abuse and persecution for, in his true compassion he understands, in his continual experience of Reality he knows, and in his infinite mercy he forgives.”

Meher Baba (1894–1969) Indian mystic

Meher Baba’s Call (1954)

Women, Men, God, Truth

“Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 89
The Book of Disquiet
Original: A civilização consiste em dar a qualquer coisa um nome que lhe não compete, e depois sonhar sobre o resultado. E realmente o nome falso e o sonho verdadeiro criam uma nova realidade. O objecto torna-se realmente outro, porque o tornámos outro. Manufacturamos realidades.

Dreams, Falseness

“Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

Idea, Appearance, Passion, Animals

“First of all I want to remind you of the essential features of models. In my opinion they are: (i) drawing up a list of the variables to be considered; (ii) drawing up a list of the equations or relations the variables have to obey and (iii) testing the validity of the equations, which implies the estimation of their coefficients, if any. As a consequence of especially (iii) we may have to revise (i) and (ii) so as to arrive at a satisfactory degree of realism of the theory embodied in the model. Then, the model may be used for various purposes, that is, for the solution of various problems. The advantages of models are, on one hand, that they force us to present a "complete" theory by which I mean a theory taking into account all relevant phenomena and relations and, on the other hand, the confrontation with observation, that is, reality. Of course these remarks are far from new.”

Jan Tinbergen (1903–1994) Dutch economist

"The Use of Models: Experience," 1969

Problem, Drawing

“The stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

Stupidity, Intelligence

“Conditioning obstructs our view of reality. — We do not see IT in its suchness because of our indoctrination, crooked and twisted.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 19

“If we want to transform reality, we begin with ourselves. We do not ask the world to change, and we do not fight against society. It has to be us ourselves who affirm our own values.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky (1929) Filmmaker and comics writer

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)

World, Change, Fight

“(…) Theories are neither right nor wrong. They are attempts at explaining the inexplicable. It is not the theory that matters, but the way it is being tested. (…) Experiment with any theory you like – if you are truly earnest and honest, the attainment of reality will be yours. (…) It is the earnestness that liberates and not the theory.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Liberation
Source: I am That, P.118-9.

Way

“Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 112
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

“Neo-Plasticism has its roots in Cubism. It could just as easy be called the Painting of Real Abstraction. Since the abstract can be expressed by a plastic reality... It achieves what all painting has tried to achieve but has been able to express only in a veiled manner. By their position and their dimension as well as by the importance of given to colour, the coloured planes express in a plastic way only relations and not forms. Neo-Plasticism imparts to these relations an aesthetic balance and thereby expresses universal harmony... For the moment what art had discovered must still be limited to art itself. Our environment cannot yet be realized as a creation of pure harmony. Art today is at the very point formerly occupied by religion. In its deepest meaning art was the transposition of the natural [into another plane]; in practice it always sought to achieve harmony between man and untransposed nature. Generally speaking, so do Theosophy and Anthroposophy, although these already possessed the original symbol of balance. And this is why they never were able to achieve equivalent relations, that is to say true harmony.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in Mondrian's letter to Rudolf Steiner, c. 1921-23; as cited in Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co 1964, p. 83-85
1920's

Religion, Art, Way, Nature

“In war, character and opinion make more than half of the reality.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

War

“317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is, because mathematical reality is built that way.”

G. H. Hardy book A Mathematician's Apology

A Mathematician's Apology (1941)

Way, Mathematics, Thinking

“We must all educate ourselves to the reality of the horrors taking place. Doctors today know that unborn children can feel a touch within the womb and that they respond to pain.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1980s, First term of office (1981–1985), Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation (1983)

Pain, Children, Education, Feeling

“This is ex-Beatle, John Lennon. I've been wanting to write you, but I guess I didn't really want to face reality. I never do this, this is why I take drugs. Reality frightens me and paranoids me. True, I have a lot of money… but basically, I'm afraid to face the problems of life. Let me begin to say, I regret that I said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. I don't even like myself anymore — guilt. My Cousin, Marilyn McCabe has tried to help me. She told me you were praying for me. … I want happiness. I don't want to keep up with drugs… Explain to me what Christianity can do for me. Is it phoney? Can He love me? I want out of Hell.
I am, I hate to say, under the influence of pills now. I can't stop. I only wish I could thank you for caring.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Letter to Oral Roberts in 1972, as quoted in Oral Roberts : An American Life‎ (1985) by David Edwin Harrell, p. 310; later published in How to be a Successful Teenager (1994) by Rick Jones, Ch. 5 : The Secret About Material Things, p. 54; the accuracy of this is disputed in "The Gospel of John Lennon" in This Land Press (7 March 2011) http://thislandpress.com/03/07/2011/the-gospel-of-john-lennon/ <br class="br">Disputed

Love, Life, Money, Hate

“In this way, a philosophy which veiled the Philistine confessions of its founder beneath neat twists and flourishes of language proceeded further to discover a formula for the canonization of the commonplace. It expatiated upon the rationalism of all reality, and thus ingratiated itself with the Culture-Philistine, who also loves neat twists and flourishes, and who, above all, considers himself real, and regards his reality as the standard of reason for the world. From this time forward he began to allow every one, and even himself, to reflect, to investigate, to aestheticise, and, more particularly, to make poetry, music, and even pictures—not to mention systems of philosophy; provided, of course, that … no assault were made upon the “reasonable” and the “real”—that is to say, upon the Philistine.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

(A. Ludovici trans.), “David Strauss,” § 1.2, p. 17
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Love, World, Music, Way

“[Stalin's] purge caused me to examine the meaning of Communism…. I had always known of course that there were books critical of Communism…. I had never read them because I knew that the party did not want me to read them….. the first book I read… was called I Speak for the Silent [by] Professor Vladimir Tchernavin…. He was a little man in the Communist world, gentle, humane, good…. Suddenly for no reason at all he was arrested and carried away by the secret police…. Now for the first time, I believed that slave labor camps existed…. I said ‘this is evil, absolute evil. Of this evil I am a part.’ … If Communism were evil, what was left but moral chaos? …. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind – the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul….”

Whittaker Chambers Witness

Source: Witness (1952), pp. 79-83

God, Secret, Books, World

“Now, without directly altering the existing condition of things, it is possible to work upon the human mind and character, and give them a direction no more correspondent with that condition; and this it is precisely which he who is wise will endeavour to do. Only in this way is it possible to reproduce the new system in reality, just as it has been conceived in idea; and in every other method (setting aside the evils which arise from disturbing the natural order of human development) it is changed, modified, disfigured by the remaining influence of preceding systems, in the actual state of circumstances as well as in the minds of men. But if this obstacle be removed,—if the new condition of things which is resolved upon can succeed in working out its full influence, unimpeded by what was previously existing and by the circumstances of the present on which this has acted,—then must nothing further be allowed to stand in the way of the contemplated reform.”

Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835) German (Prussian) philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the University of Berlin

Source: The Limits of State Action (1792), Ch. 16

Men, Way, Idea, Nature

“It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.”

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) Russian composer, pianist and conductor

Source: 1970s and later, Themes and Conclusions (1982), p. 188.

Art, Music, Nature

“For decades, this vision stood in sharp contrast to life on the other side of an Iron Curtain. For decades, a contest was waged, and ultimately that contest was won -- not by tanks or missiles, but because our ideals stirred the hearts of Hungarians who sparked a revolution; Poles in their shipyards who stood in Solidarity; Czechs who waged a Velvet Revolution without firing a shot; and East Berliners who marched past the guards and finally tore down that wall. Today, what would have seemed impossible in the trenches of Flanders, the rubble of Berlin, or a dissident’s prison cell -- that reality is taken for granted. A Germany unified. The nations of Central and Eastern Europe welcomed into the family of democracies. Here in this country, once the battleground of Europe, we meet in the hub of a Union that brings together age-old adversaries in peace and cooperation. The people of Europe, hundreds of millions of citizens -- east, west, north, south -- are more secure and more prosperous because we stood together for the ideals we share. And this story of human progress was by no means limited to Europe. Indeed, the ideals that came to define our alliance also inspired movements across the globe among those very people, ironically, who had too often been denied their full rights by Western powers. After the Second World War, people from Africa to India threw off the yoke of colonialism to secure their independence. In the United States, citizens took freedom rides and endured beatings to put an end to segregation and to secure their civil rights. As the Iron Curtain fell here in Europe, the iron fist of apartheid was unclenched, and Nelson Mandela emerged upright, proud, from prison to lead a multiracial democracy. Latin American nations rejected dictatorship and built new democracies, and Asian nations showed that development and democracy could go hand in hand.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Address to European Youth (March 2014)

Life, War, People, Age

“What is meant here is that man should not become immersed in loving the world which will make him forget the responsibilities that Allah had ordered him to hold, but he has to look at the world in its reality, in which it represents a place for obeying Allah.”

Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (1935–2010) Lebanese faqih

The mutual love between Allah and His servants http://english.bayynat.org.lb/Doctrines/Themutual1.htm

Love, World, Forgetting

“…there is probably less difference between the positions of a mathematician and of a physicist than is generally supposed, […] the mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. This may seem a paradox, since it is the physicist who deals with the subject-matter usually described as ‘real’, but […] [a physicist] is trying to correlate the incoherent body of crude fact confronting him with some definite and orderly scheme of abstract relations, the kind of scheme he can borrow only from mathematics.”

G. H. Hardy book A Mathematician's Apology

A Mathematician's Apology (1941)

Mathematics

“I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner reality.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 376
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Sou um homem para quem o mundo exterior é uma realidade interior.

World

“To avoid starting out on the wrong foot we must keep in mind, then, that (a) the democratic ideal does not define the democratic reality and, vice versa, a real democracy is not, and cannot be, the same as an ideal one; and that (b) democracy results from, and is shaped by, the interactions between its ideals and its reality, the pull of an ought and the resistance of an is.”

Giovanni Sartori (1924–2017) Italian journalist and political scientist

The Theory of Democracy Revisited (1987), 1. Can Democracy Be Just Anyting?

Democracy

“As all our knowledge of the material world is derived from the information of our senses, natural philosophers have, in modern times, wisely abandoned to metaphysicians, all speculations concerning the nature of that substance of which it is composed; concerning the possibility or impossibility of its being created; concerning the efficient causes of the changes which take place in it; and even concerning the reality of its existence, independent of that of percipient beings: and have confined themselves to the humbler province of observing the phenomena it exhibits, and of ascertaining their general laws.”

Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) Scottish philosopher and mathematician

Source: Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1792, p. 12

World, Law, Nature, Knowledge

“The eye of perfected friendship with God is aware of deeper dimensions of reality, to which the eyes of the average man and the average Christian are not yet opened.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance (1965)

God, Friendship, Perfection

“Reality is a creation of our excesses.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed…”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy

Der philosophische Mensch hat sogar das Vorgefühl, dass auch unter dieser Wirklichkeit, in der wir leben und sind, eine zweite ganz andre verborgen liege...
Source: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), p. 23, William Haussmann translation

“The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909) German mathematician and physicist

Address to the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, (Sep 21, 1908)

Time

“God is only an idea in your mind. The fact is you. The only thing you know for sure is: ‘here and now I am.’ Remove the ’here and now’ the ‘I am’ remains, unassailable. (…). All I can say truly is: ‘I am,’ all else is inference (…). The sense ‘I am’ is the manifestation of a deeper cause, which you may call self, God, Reality or by any other name. (…).”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

God
Source: I am That, P.199.

God, Idea, Sense

“The primary reality is not what I think, but that I live, for those also live who do not think.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 7

Thinking

“Moreover, humour is itself but a superficial view of that which is in truth both tragic and terrible—the contrast between human pretence and cosmic mechanical reality. Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration. All great humorists are sad—Mark Twain was a cynic and agnostic, and wrote "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What Is Man?" When I was younger I wrote humorous matter—satire and light verse—and was known to many as a jester and parodist. … But I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest—the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

"The Defence Remains Open!" (April 1921), published in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 54
Non-Fiction

God, Truth, World, Sadness

“What is at stake here is precisely the problem of the fulfillment of desire: when we encounter in reality an object which has all the properties of the fantasized object of desire, we are nevertheless necessarily somewhat disappointed; we experience a certain this is not it; it becomes evident that the finally found real object is not the reference of desire even though it possesses all the required properties.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

106
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Disappointment, Problem

“Nature, body, mind go to death, not we. We neither go nor come. The man Vivekananda is in nature, is born and dies; but the Self we see as Vivekananda is never born and never dies. It is the eternal and unchangeable Reality.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Death, Nature

“Ultimately, peace is just not about politics. It’s about attitudes; about a sense of empathy; about breaking down the divisions that we create for ourselves in our own minds and our own hearts that don’t exist in any objective reality, but that we carry with us generation after generation.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by President Obama and Mrs. Obama in Town Hall with Youth of Northern Ireland, Belfast Waterfront, Belfast, Northern Ireland (17 June 2013) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/17/remarks-president-obama-and-mrs-obama-town-hall-youth-northern-ireland <br class="br">2013

Peace, Sense, Heart

“This oppressor, this machine that has gone mad and run amok, it is berserk. They keep telling us, "progress.” They keep telling us “face reality.” Well, let’s deal with reality. Reality is the Earth can no longer take this attack. We can no longer allow this Thing to continue when it’s polluting the air, it’s polluting the water, polluting our food. They pollute the air, they pollute the water, they pollute our food, they pollute our minds.”

John Trudell (1946–2015) Native American rights activist, musician, poet

"We are Power" speech (1980)

Food, Water, Madness

“Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Sec. 78
The Gay Science (1882)

Art, Appearance

“America - a conservative country without any conservative ideology - appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality. The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude. In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality, are raised to principle. Public relations and the official secret, the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished, are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and the political vacuum of modern America.”

C. Wright Mills book The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

Men, Secret, World, Idea

“Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.”

Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) American scientist (1894–1956)

Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948)

World, Sex, Behavior, Understanding

“I don't like film. Film is too clankingly real, too permanent, too industrial for me. … The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusions. It makes them impossible. It's a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's.”

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) American writer

"Preface"
Between Time and Timbuktu (1972)

People

“There is an ancient Chinese saying "He who labours with his mind rules over he who labours with his hand". This kind of backward idea is very harmful to youngsters from developing countries. Partly because of this type of concept, many students from these countries are inclined towards theoretical studies and avoid experimental work.

In reality, a theory in natural science cannot be without experimental foundations; physics, in particular, comes from experimental work.”

Samuel C. C. Ting (1936) physicist

Nobel banquet speech http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1976/ting-speech.html, December 10, 1976

Idea, Nature, Study, Science

“Visions are a feeble resource, you will say, against great adversity! Oh Sir, these visions may possibly have more reality than all those apparent goods about which men make so much ado, for they never bring a true feeling of happiness to the soul, and those who possess them are equally forced to project themselves into the future for want of finding enjoyments that satisfy them, in the present.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques (published 1782)
Source: Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters

Men, Happiness, Feeling, Soul

“Propaganda analysis can contribute to world peace by exposing those techniques that lead to armed conflict by creating misapprehension of reality.”

Randal Marlin (1938) Canadian academic

Source: Propaganda & The Ethics Of Persuasion (2002), Chapter Eight, Propaganda, Democracy, And the Internet, p. 305

World, Peace

“The social stock of knowledge differentiates reality by degrees of familiarity… my knowledge of my own occupation and its world is very rich and specific, while I have only very sketchy knowledge of the occupational worlds of others.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 43

World, Knowledge

“A psychologist said, “They used to talk about seeing only ‘reflections’ of reality. Not reality itself. The main thing wrong with a reflection is not that it isn’t real, but that it’s reversed.””

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 13 (p. 213)

“As for your artificial conception of "splendid & traditional ways of life"—I feel quite confident that you are very largely constructing a mythological idealisation of something which never truly existed; a conventional picture based on the perusal of books which followed certain hackneyed lines in the matter of incidents, sentiments, & situations, & which never had a close relationship to the actual societies they professed to depict... In some ways the life of certain earlier periods had marked advantages over life today, but there were compensating disadvantages which would make many hesitate about a choice. Some of the most literarily attractive ages had a coarseness, stridency, & squalor which we would find insupportable... Modern neurotics, lolling in stuffed easy chairs, merely make a myth of these old periods & use them as the nuclei of escapist daydreams whose substance resembles but little the stern actualities of yesterday. That is undoubtedly the case with me—only I'm fully aware of it. Except in certain selected circles, I would undoubtedly find my own 18th century insufferably coarse, orthodox, arrogant, narrow, & artificial. What I look back upon nostalgically is a dream-world which I invented at the age of four from picture books & the Georgian hill streets of Old Providence.... There is something artificial & hollow & unconvincing about self-conscious intellectual traditionalism—this being, of course, the only valid objection against it. The best sort of traditionalism is that easy-going eclectic sort which indulges in no frenzied pulmotor stunts, but courses naturally down from generation to generation; bequeathing such elements as really are sound, losing such as have lost value, & adding any which new conditions may make necessary.... In short, young man, I have no quarrel with the principle of traditionalism as such, but I have a decided quarrel with everything that is insincere, inappropriate, & disproportionate; for these qualities mean ugliness & weakness in the most offensive degree. I object to the feigning of artificial moods on the part of literary moderns who cannot even begin to enter into the life & feelings of the past which they claim to represent... If there were any reality or depth of feeling involved, the case would be different; but almost invariably the neotraditionalists are sequestered persons remote from any real contacts or experience with life... For any person today to fancy he can truly enter into the life & feeling of another period is really nothing but a confession of ignorance of the depth & nature of life in its full sense. This is the case with myself. I feel I am living in the 18th century, though my objective judgment knows better, & realises the vast difference from the real thing. The one redeeming thing about my ignorance of life & remoteness from reality is that I am fully conscious of it, hence (in the last few years) make allowances for it, & do not pretend to an impossible ability to enter into the actual feelings of this or any other age. The emotions of the past were derived from experiences, beliefs, customs, living conditions, historic backgrounds, horizons, &c. &c. so different from our own, that it is simply silly to fancy we can duplicate them, or enter warmly & subjectively into all phases of their aesthetic expression.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 307
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

Life, Books, Age, World

“Anything physical is always changing, therefore, its reality is not constant, not eternal. Nature is in this sense like an actor who has only different roles.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 8

Nature, Sense, Change

“Essentially, economic analysis consists of: (1) an understanding of the categories of action and an understanding of the meaning of a change in values, costs, technological knowledge, etc.; (2) a description of a situation in which these categories assume concrete meaning, where definite people are identified as actors with definite objects specified as their means of action, with definite goals identified as values and definite things specified as costs; and (3) a deduction of the consequences that result from the performance of some specified action in this situation, or of the consequences that result for an actor if this situation is changed in a specified way. And this deduction must yield a priori-valid conclusions, provided there is no flaw in the very process of deduction and the situation and the change introduced into it being given, and a priori—valid conclusions about reality if the situation and situation—change, as described, can themselves be identified as real, because then their validity would ultimately go back to the indisputable validity of the categories of action.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe book A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism

A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics (Kluwer: 1989): 118-19.
A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (1989)

People, Way, Understanding, Knowledge

“Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Look at the Harlequins! (1974).

World

“If everybody would agree that their current reality is a reality, and that what we essentially share is our capacity for constructing a reality, then perhaps we could all agree on a meta-agreement for computing a reality that would mean survival and dignity for everyone on the planet, rather than each group being sold on a particular way of doing things.”

Francisco Varela (1946–2001) Chilean biologist

Varela (1975) in: Anne Waldman eds. (1975) The Coevolution quarterly. Nr. 8-12, p. 31

Way

“The present age… prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence… for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.”

Ludwig Feuerbach book The Essence of Christianity

Aber freilich für diese Zeit, welche das Bild der Sache, die Kopie dem Original, die Vorstellung der Wirklichkeit, den Schein dem Wesen vorzieht … denn heilig ist ihr nur die Illusion, profan aber die Wahrheit.
Preface to Second Edition (1843)
The Essence of Christianity (1841)

Truth, Age, Appearance

“Experience is valuable only when it has brought suffering and when the suffering has left its mark upon both body and mind. Sleepless nights and conflicts with reality make statesmen realists; how could these experiences be usefully handed on to young idealists who expect to transform the universe without effort? The counsels of Polonius are platitudes, but the moment we start giving advice we are all like Polonius. For us those platitudes are packed with meaning, memories, and visions. For our children, they are abstract and boring. We should like to make a wise woman of a girl of twenty; it is physiologically impossible. "The counsels of old age," said Vauvenargues, "are like a winter's sun which gives light but no warmth."”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Family Life

Children, Age, Girl, Effort

“I can tell you that — and this is something I have told him — that this is a job of such magnitude that you can’t do it by yourself. You are enormously reliant on a team. Your Cabinet, your senior White House staff, all the way to fairly junior folks in their 20s and 30s but who are executing on significant responsibilities. And so, how you put a team together to make sure that they’re getting you the best information and they are teeing up the options from which you will ultimately make decisions. That’s probably the most useful constructive advice and the most constructive advice that I’ve been able to give him, that if you find yourself isolated because the process breaks down or if you’re only hearing from people who agree with you on everything or if you haven’t created a process that is fact-checking and probing and asking hard questions about policies or promises that you’ve made, that’s when you start making mistakes. And as I indicated in some of my previous remarks, reality has a way of biting back if you’re not paying attention to it.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

On the job of the U.S. President and the need of good advisers and staff
2017, Final News Conference as President (January 2017)

People, Way, Question, Decision

“The ideal solution of the problem of transportation will be arrived at only when the complete annihilation of distance in the transmission of power in large amounts shall have become a commercial reality. That day we shall invade the domain of the bird. When the vexing problem of aerial navigation, which has defied his attempts for ages, is solved, man will advance with giant strides.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Age, Problem, Bird

“Jazz is the false liquidation of art — instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Perennial fashion — Jazz, as quoted in The Sociology of Rock (1978) by Simon Frith

Art, Falseness

“You always hear people say that philosophy makes no progress and that the same philosophical problems which were already preoccupying the Greeks are still troubling us today. But people who say that do not understand the reason why it has to be so. The reason is that our language has remained the same and always introduces us to the same questions…. I read: "philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of 'Reality' than Plato got,…". What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 15e

People, Understanding, Question, Problem

“The family is in flux, and signs of trouble are widespread. Expectations remain high. But realities are disturbing.”

Robert N. Bellah (1927–2013) American sociologist

The Good Society, ch. 1 (1991)

Family

“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.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1910s, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), Ch. 16: Descriptions

World, Feeling, Mountain, Failure

“Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this ancient Holy Land, the House of Abraham, Muhammad, and all the other Prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors....
You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.

During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug) -- while praying to the same God -- with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the actions and in the deeds of the "white" Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan, and Ghana.

We were truly all the same (brothers) -- because their belief in one God had removed the "white" from their minds, the 'white' from their behavior, and the 'white' from their attitude.

I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man -- and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their "differences" in color.

With racism plaguing America like an incurable cancer, the so-called "Christian" white American heart should be more receptive to a proven solution to such a destructive problem. Perhaps it could be in time to save America from imminent disaster -- the same destruction brought upon Germany by racism that eventually destroyed the Germans themselves.

They asked me what about the Hajj had impressed me the most.... I said, "The brotherhood! The people of all races, color, from all over the world coming to gether as one! It has proved to me the power of the One God.... All ate as one, and slept as one. Everything about the pilgrimage atmosphere accented the Oneness of Man under One God.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Text of a letter written following his Hajj (1964)

Life, God, People, Truth

“The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

Universe

“As we grow old, we become aware that death is drawing near; his shadow falls across our path; the realities of life seem less crude than of yore, they touch our senses less intimately, and they lose much of their poignancy.”

Stefan Zweig book Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman

Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927)

Life, Death, Sense, Drawing

“Reality is reality. It is the way things are, not the way you want them to be in your head.”

Dave Sim (1956) Canadian cartoonist, creator of Cerebus

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cerebus/message/108250
Dave Sim's Collected Letters Volume 2 (2007)

Way

“.. reality reveals itself by substantial, palpable forms, accumulated or dispersed in empty space.... these forms are part of that space and.... the space between them appears as form, a fact which evidences the unity of form and space.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Source: 1940's, A New Realism', 1943-1945, p. 18

Appearance, Parting

“Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

Truth, Madness

“The advantages of models are, on one hand, that they force us to present a "complete" theory by which I mean a theory taking into account all relevant phenomena and relations and, on the other hand, the confrontation with observation, that is, reality.”

Jan Tinbergen (1903–1994) Dutch economist

"The Use of Models: Experience," 1969

“The old and oft-repeated proposition "Totum est majus sua parte" [the whole is larger than the part] may be applied without proof only in the case of entities that are based upon whole and part; then and only then is it an undeniable consequence of the concepts "totum" and "pars". Unfortunately, however, this "axiom" is used innumerably often without any basis and in neglect of the necessary distinction between "reality" and "quantity", on the one hand, and "number" and "set", on the other, precisely in the sense in which it is generally false.”

Georg Cantor (1845–1918) mathematician, inventor of set theory

"Über unendliche, lineare Punktmannigfaltigkeiten" in Mathematische Annalen 20 (1882)  Quoted in "Cantor's Grundlagen and the paradoxes of Set Theory" by William W. Tait

Sense, Parting, Falseness

“Is this even possible today?-But some day, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, he must yet come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compeHing strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond, whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality-while it is only his' absorption, immersion, penetration into reality, so that, when he one day emerges again into the light, he may bring home the redemption of this reality: its redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning ideal has laid upon it. This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness- he must come one day.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 2, Aphorism 24
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Love, God, People, Age

“Our nation was founded on a bedrock principle that we are all created equal. The project of each generation is to bridge the meaning of those founding words with the realities of changing times -- a never-ending quest to ensure those words ring true for every single American. Progress on this journey often comes in small increments, sometimes two steps forward, one step back, propelled by the persistent effort of dedicated citizens. And then sometimes, there are days like this when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Supreme Court Decision on Marriage Equality (June 2015)

Justice, Effort, Change, Time

“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.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 19

Peace

“When reality fails you change reality to support your beliefs and ignore the nagging voices in your head that tells you otherwise for they are trying to distract you from the one true God.”

James Woods (1947) American film, stage and television actor

The Daily Mail, 20 October 2013

God, Support, Change

“I dreamed of becoming a writer. And... this dream is about to become a reality with the publication of my first, and hopefully not my last, children's book...”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

address to LULAC (July 1, 2005)
2007, 2008

Children, Books, Dreams

“"It would be a crime to exhibit the fine side of war, even if there were one!" murmured one of the somber soldiers.
The first man continued. "They'll say those things to us by way of paying us with glory, and to pay themselves, too, for what they haven't done. But military glory — it isn't even true for us common soldiers. It's for some, but outside those elect the soldier's glory is a lie, like every other fine-looking thing in war. In reality, the soldier's sacrifice is obscurely concealed. The multitudes that make up the waves of attack have no reward. They run to hurl themselves into a frightful inglorious nothing. You cannot even heap up their names, their poor little names of nobodies."”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn

War, Lie, Way

“Can a physicist visualize an electron? The electron is materially inconceivable and yet, it is so perfectly known through its effects that we use it to illuminate our cities, guide our airlines through the night skies and take the most accurate measurements. What strange rationale makes some physicists accept the inconceivable electrons as real while refusing to accept the reality of a Designer on the ground that they cannot conceive Him?”

Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) German, later an American, aerospace engineer and space architect

In letter to California State board of Education (14 September 1972)

Night

“You won't — I really believe — get too much out of reading it. Because you won't understand it; the content will seem strange to you. In reality, it isn't strange to you, for the point is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

On his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker (1919), published in Wittgenstein : Sources and Perspectives (1979) by C. Grant Luckhard
1910s

Understanding, Reading, Parting

“The entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property – more precisely, in that of the economy. This material, immediately perceptible private property is the material perceptible expression of estranged human life. Its movement – production and consumption – is the perceptible revelation of the movement of all production until now, i. e., the realisation or the reality of man. Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of private property as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i. e., social, existence. Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of consciousness, of man’s inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life; its transcendence therefore embraces both aspects. It is evident that the initial stage of the movement amongst the various peoples depends on whether the true recognised life of the people manifests itself more in consciousness or in the external world – is more ideal or real. Communism begins where atheism begins (Owen), but atheism is at the outset still far from being communism; indeed it is still for the most part an abstraction. The philanthropy of atheism is therefore at first only philosophical, abstract philanthropy, and that of communism is at once real and directly bent on action.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Private Property and Communism
Paris Manuscripts (1844)

Life, People, World, Family

“Theoretical approaches have their place and are, I suppose, essential but a theory must be tempered with reality.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

Jawaharlal Nehru's Speeches 1949 - 1953 (1954), p. 235

“To me, absurdity is the only reality.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

As quoted a review of This door is too small (for a bear) (2010) http://www.needcompany.org/cgi-bin/www_edit/projects/nc/scripts/nc.cgi?session=38&a=v&t=EN&id=11029

“The relational model provides different categories, different underlying structures into which experience can be organized. Here the establishment of strong connections to others, in reality or in fantasy, is presumed to be primary. Forms of relationship are seen as fundamental, and life is understood largely as an array of metaphors for expressing and playing out relational patterns: discovery, penetration, domination, surrender, control, longing, evasion, revelation, envelopment, merger, differentiation, and so on. The body is still centrally important. Sexuality and bodily experiences are viewed as particularly apt arenas for this activity, since sexuality is enormously multiform and plastic. The number of different body parts, the variability of interactions, the poignancy of the sensations, the immense number of combinations — the almost infinite variety of human sexual possibilities make this an enormously fertile reservoir of metaphors for expressing different types of relationships, different configurations of connections, between self and others.”

Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) American psychologist

Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 91

Life, Strong, Parting

“In the midst of our high-tech, ostentatious, hedonistic lifestyle, among the dazzling monuments to history, art, religion, and commerce, there are the 'black boxes.' These are the biomedical research laboratories, factory farms, and slaughterhouses—faceless compounds where society conducts its dirty business of abusing and killing innocent, feeling beings. These are our Dachaus, our Buchenwalds, our Birkenaus. Like the good German burghers, we have a fair idea of what goes on there, but we don't want any reality checks.”

Alex Hershaft (1934) American activist

From his review of Gail Eisnitz's Slaughterhouse; as quoted in Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), p. 145.

Religion, Art, Feeling, History

“We cannot afford to be a country of isolationists right now. 9/11 showed us that try as we might to ignore the rest of the world, our enemies will no longer ignore us. And so we need to maintain a strong foreign policy, relentless in pursuing our enemies and hopeful in promoting our values around the world. But to guard against isolationist sentiments in this country, we must change conditions in Iraq and the policy that has characterized our time there – a policy based on blind hope and ideology instead of fact and reality.
Americans called for this more serious policy a few Tuesdays ago. It’s time that we listen to their concerns and win back their trust. I spoke here a year ago and delivered a message about Iraq that was similar to the one I did today. I refuse to accept the possibility that I will have to come back a year from now and say the same thing. There have been too many speeches. There have been too many excuses. There have been too many flag-draped coffins, and there have been too many heartbroken families. The time for waiting in Iraq is over. It is time to change our policy. It is time to give Iraqis their country back. And it is time to refocus America’s efforts on the wider struggle yet to be won.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

"A Way Forward in Iraq", Remarks to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (20 November 2006)
2006

World, Family, Hope, Effort

“This two-way transformation proceeds from metaphysical perceptions, for metaphysics is the search for the essential nature of reality. And so artistic creation is the metamorphosis of the external physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality. Such is the magic act which takes place continuously in the development of a work of art. On this and only on this is creation based.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 40
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Art, Way, Search, Nature

“Step by step, let whatever happens happen. Real change will come when it is brought about, not by your ego, but by reality. Awareness releases reality to change you.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

"Assorted Landmines", p. 148
Awareness (1992)

Change

“Very much screwed in the head by trying to get Roger's marriage chapter into shape; and also warmed by L. saying last night that he was fonder of me than I of him. A discussion as to which would mind the other's death most. He said he depended more upon our common life than I did. He gave the garden as an instance. He said I live more in a world of my own. I go for long walks alone. So we argued. I was very happy to think I was so much needed. Its strange how seldom one feels this: yet 'life in common' is an immense reality.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Friday 28 April, 1939
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Life, Death, Marriage, Happiness

“Appearance should never attain reality,
And if nature conquers, then must art retire.”

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright

To Goethe, when he put Voltaire's Mahomet on the stage (1800)

Art, Nature, Appearance

“While the average well adjusted man can make the reality that is generally accepted as truth into his own truth, the creative searcher after truth seeks and finds his own truth which he then wants to make general.”

Otto Rank (1884–1939) Austrian psychologist

Source: Truth and Reality (1936), p. 43

Truth

“The differential between the bubble we live in — which is ‘ordinary life’ — and the reality out there is almost as heavy as what is being depicted in a film like ‘the Matrix’. It could make you puke to make that step towards finding out what’s really going on.”

Matthew Bellamy (1978) English singer-songwriter

Paul Branningan «We're months away from World War III» — p. 43 — Kerrang! (2006-11-10) http://www.musewiki.org/We're_months_away_from_World_War_III_(20061011_Kerrang_article)

Life