Quotes about reality
page 36

“When someone tells you, “I love you,” and then you feel, “Oh, I must be worthy after all,” that’s an illusion. That’s not true. Or someone says, “I hate you,” and you think, “Oh, God, I knew it; I’m not very worthy,” that’s not true either. Neither one of these thoughts hold any intrinsic reality. They are an overlay. When someone says, “I love you,” he is telling you about himself, not you. When someone says, “I hate you,” she is telling you about herself, not you. World views are self views—literally.”

Adyashanti (1962) Spiritual teacher

“God is the only reality, and we are real only so far as we are in His order, and He is in us.”

Coventry Patmore (1823–1896) English poet

Magna Moralia XXII, p. 172.
The Rod, the Root, and the Flower (1895)

God

“Science can function only by abstracting from the reality in which the scientist has his being. In spite of the astonishing complications it discovers, with which it dazzles and almost blinds us, science is compelled by its own terms of reference to be a drastic simplification.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 10, p. 253

Science

“I have pointed out already how ideas seep down to wider and commoner levels of intelligence and feeling until at last they are believed to be solid realities.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 7, p. 159

Feeling, Intelligence, Idea

“I consider myself a border person, even though I grew up in the south of Mexico and very north of the U.S., in Minneapolis. I hold many of the same realities with the people who have grown up around these borders. We share the languages, they have a very kind of open identity of who we are, they are constantly growing and learning from different cultures, and also absorb what comes from other cultures to make it our own…”

Lila Downs (1968) Mexican American singer-songwriter

On her affinity with those who were raised or reside on the U.S.-Mexico border in “Q&A: Lila Downs, A Sin and A Miracle” https://remezcla.com/music/lila-downs-sin-miracle-pecados-milagros-interview/ in Remezcla (c. 2011) <br class="br">Heritage and indigenous peoples

People, Making love, Learning, Personality

“The idea of community presupposes the idea of something in common as well as the idea of community members who have in common what is held in common. [...] Perhaps there is only one and the same reality, one and the same essence, of community and its members. Let us give a name right away to this single and essential reality of the community and its members: life. So, we can already say that the essence of community is life; every community is a community of living beings.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 118-119
Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

Life, Communication, Idea

“To radicalize the question of phenomenology is not only to aim for a pure phenomenality but to seek out the mode according to which it originally becomes a phenomenon -- the substance, the stuff, the phenomenological matter of which it is made, its phenomenologically pure materiality. That is the task of material phenomenology. Prior to this being-toward-the-outside in which everything is properly speaking placed outside of itself and in which every reality is a priori emptied and dispossessed of itself and thus becomes its contrary, an irreality, and prior to the abandonment and undoing that is called death and that would be unable to exist on its own, material phenomenology is devoted to the discovery of the reign of a phenomenality that is constructed in such a surprising way that the thought that always thinks about the world never thinks about it. To the internal structure of this originary manifestation, there belongs no Outside, no Separation, no Ek-stasis. Its phenomenological substance is not visibility. None of the categories that have been used by philosophy since the Greeks at any rate, are appropriate for it.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Source: Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 2
Source: Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

Death, World, Way, Question

“The task of material phenomenology is immense. It is not simply to be attached to another order of phenomena that remained neglected up to now but to rethink everything, if one can think reality. Every sphere of reality must become the object of a new analysis that goes back to its invisible dimension. And this concerns material nature as well, which is a living cosmos. Since material phenomenology implies the revival of philosophical questioning in its entirety, it offers a future to phenomenology and to philosophy itself. At the same time, it discovers a new past.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Source: Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 6
Source: Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

Question, Nature, Thinking, Time

“There are many ways in which the intuition can be drawn into activity, and one of the most useful and potent is the study and interpretation of symbols. Symbols are the outer and visible forms of the inner spiritual realities, and when facility in discovering the reality behind any specific form has been gained, that very fact will indicate the awakening of the intuition.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: Glamour: A World Problem (1950), Certain Preliminary Clarifications

Way, Study

“The reality is that racial lynchings were a frequent and normal feature of life in the South. This unique method of murder was a devastating form of terrorism that imposed a constant threat to all black people. The white authority structure did not only tolerate or encourage these killings but used the fear of lynchings to control and oppress black people.”

Guy P. Harrison (1963) American skeptic author

Life, People, Fear

“The most basic problem for democracy raided by propaganda is the possibility that the vocabulary of liberal democracy is used to mask an undemocratic reality. If so, there could be a state that appeared to be a liberal democracy. It would be a state the citizens of which believed was a liberal democracy. But the appearance of liberal democracy would be merely the outer trappings of an illiberal, undemocratic reality.”

Jason Stanley book How Propaganda Works

Source: How Propaganda Works (2015), p. 11

Democracy, Problem, Appearance

“I think we must allow that dephlogisticated air is in reality nothing but dephlogisticated water, or water deprived of its phlogiston; or, in other words, that water consists of dephlogisticated air united to phlogiston; and that inflammable air is either pure phlogiston, as Dr. Priestley and Mr. Kirwan suppose [and as Cavendish formerly supposed], or else water united to phlogiston; since, according to this supposition, these two substances united together form pure water. On the other hand, if the first explanation be true, we must suppose that dephlogisticated air consists of water united to a little nitrous acid and deprived of its phlogiston; but still the nitrous acid in it must make only a very small part of the whole, as it is found, that the phlogisticated air, which it is converted into, is very small in comparison of the dephlogisticated air.”

Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) British natural philosopher, scientist, and an important experimental and theoretical chemist and physicist

pp. 171-172. https://books.google.com/books?id=ygqYnSR3oe0C&pg=PA171 <br class="br">The Scientific Papers of the Honourable Henry Cavendish, F.R.S (1921), Experiments on Air By (1784)

Making love, Thinking, Water, Parting

“[W]e understand that if the child were to give in to the overpowering character of reality and experience he would not be able to act with the kind of equanimity we need in our non-instinctive world. So one of the first things a child has to do is to learn to “abandon ecstasy,” to do without awe, to leave fear and trembling behind. Only then can he act with a certain oblivious self-confidence, when he has naturalized his world. We say “naturalized” but we mean unnaturalized, falsified, with the truth obscured, the despair of the human condition hidden, a despair that the child glimpses in his night terrors and daytime phobias and neuroses. This despair he avoids by building defenses; and these defenses allow him to feel a basic sense of self-worth, of meaningfulness, of power. They allow him to feel that he controls his life and his death, that he really does live and act as a willful and free individual, that he has a unique and self-fashioned identity, that he is somebody—not just a trembling accident germinated on a hothouse planet that Carlyle for all time called a “hall of doom.””

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

We called one’s life style a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one’s whole situation. This revelation is what the Freudian revolution in thought really ends up in and is the basic reason that we still strain against Freud We don’t want to admit that we arerevelation is what the Freudian revolution in thought really ends up in and is the basic reason that we still strain against Freud. We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his “courage to be” from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance.
Human Character as a Vital Lie
The Denial of Death (1973)

Life, Death, Truth, World

“I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy these days. I know that the forces that divide us are deep and they are real. But I also know they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we all are created equal, and the harsh ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, demonization have long torn us apart.The battle is perennial, and victory is never assured. Through civil war, the great depression, World War, 9/11, through struggle, sacrifices, and setbacks, our better angels have always prevailed. In each of these moments, enough of us have come together to carry all of us forward, and we can do that now.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

2021, January, Presidential Inaugural Address (2021)

War, World, Fear, Angels

“One might think that through ecstasy we would have access to a world as far from reality as that of the dream.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

The repugnant can become desirable, affection cruelty, the ugly beautiful, faults qualities, qualities black miseries.
Quote in 'Le phénomene de l'extase', in 'Minotaure' 1933; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 133
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940

World, Dreams, Thinking

“It's so ironic they [the Democratic Party] spent four years claiming they are fighting fascism and authoritarianism, and what are they trying to do now? They're trying to harness corporate and monopoly power to silence everyone who disagrees with them, the very hallmark, the epitome of the fascism they claim to be fighting, but which in reality they embody.”

Glenn Greenwald (1967) American journalist, lawyer and writer

"Greenwald: Democratic Party the epitome of fascism they claim to fight" https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/greenwald-democratic-party-the-epitome-of-fascism-they-claim-to-fight, Fox News, 25 January 2021.

Silence, Fight

“When we think about how we address problems in this country, we often start from a place of trickle-down justice. So using white folks as the control we say, well, if we make things better for white folks then everybody else is going to get free. But actually it doesn't work that way.... When we talk about the wage gap, we often say women make 78 cents to every dollar that a man makes. You all have heard that before. But those are the statistics for white women and white men. The reality is that black women make something like 64 cents to every 78 cents that white women make. When we talk about Latinas, it goes down to about 58 cents. If we were to talk about indigenous women, if we were to talk about trans women, it would even go further down. So again, if you deal with those who are the most impacted, everybody has an opportunity to benefit from that, rather than dealing with the folks who are not as impacted, and expecting it to trickle down.”

Alicia Garza (1981) Co-founder of the Black Lives Matter International movement

An Interview with the Founders of Black Lives Matter, Ted Talks, https://www.ted.com/talks/alicia_garza_patrisse_cullors_and_opal_tometi_an_interview_with_the_founders_of_black_lives_matter?language=en (October 2016)

Women, Men, Making love, Justice

“Race and racism is probably the most studied social, economic and political phenomenon in this country, but it's also the least understood. The reality is that race in the United States operates on a spectrum from black to white. Doesn't mean that people who are in between don't experience racism, but it means that the closer you are to white on that spectrum, the better off you are. And the closer to black that you are on that spectrum the worse off your are.”

Alicia Garza (1981) Co-founder of the Black Lives Matter International movement

People, Study, Country

“The night dresses us with magic, leaving us free to dream, travel, interpret everything with the depth of our soul. The power of thought and will transform desire into reality.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) La notte ci veste di magia, lasciandoci liberi di sognare, viaggiare, interpretare tutto con la profondità della propria anima. La forza del pensiero e di volontà, trasforma il desiderio in realtà.
Source: prevale.net

Dreams, Travel, Soul, Night

“The power of thought and will transform desire into reality.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) La forza del pensiero e di volontà trasforma il desiderio in realtà.
Source: prevale.net

“I propose an idealist ontology that makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. The proposed ontology also offers more explanatory power than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters.”

Bernardo Kastrup Dutch computer scientist and philosopher

" The Universe in Consciousness https://philarchive.org/archive/KASTUI", Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 25, iss. 5-6 (2018), p. 125

World, Making love, Problem, Sense

“Of course we want to be in communion, faithfulness to the universal Church but to also recognise that within the Church we have to react to the realities as they are, not as we wish them or think they should be. We have to start where we are at – to see, to judge, and to act.”

Charles Gauci (1952) Bishop of Darwin

Top End Bishop says Indigenous are ‘the most traumatised people I’ve ever met’ https://catholicleader.com.au/news/shepherd-charles-roams-the-top-end (October 14, 2019)

Faith, Thinking, Universe

“Music allows me to disconnect from my present reality, and communicate to my future wisdom.”

Isaac Mashman (2000) businessman, speaker

Wisdom, Music, Communication, Future

“I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That's been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable.”

Michael Haneke (1942) Austrian film director and screenwriter

Lawrence, Chua. "Michael Haneke" http://bombsite.com/issues/80/articles/2489, BOMB Magazine, Summer, 2002. Retrieved 29 July 2011.

Literature, Thinking

“A carnivorous animal is not an ideal animal, and never can be. The life of a carnivorous animal is a perpetual onslaught. Every meal is a murder. Eating is not the harmless activity it is to one who sits down to fruit and grains. The carnivore must kill somebody, or have somebody else do it for him, in order to eat. It cannot be otherwise. And an animal whose life is one unbroken succession of such necessities, whose stomach is the grave of hundreds and thousands, and even of tens of thousands, of his fellow-beings, may be meritorious in other respects — may preach the Golden Rule, decry war, give money to the missionary, and rail at the rich — but so long as he continues to fill himself every few hours with the blood and vitals of others, he is not only not an ideal animal, but has in reality no just claims on life. Flesh is a painful form of nutrition for any organism, but it is especially so for man, because it is unnecessary, and because man makes so many pretensions and occupies a position in the world of such exceptional responsibility.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Food of the Future, pp. 131–132

Life, Money, Pain, War

“My job is to take you to a place of fantasy and help you escape your reality. Nothing makes me happier than to put on some crazy costume and dance around. It’s what I live for.”

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

Erika Jayne interview to AXS https://www.axs.com/pain-killr-dance-queen-erika-jayne-talks-infectious-new-song-album-and-19682 (2014)

Making love, Help, Dance

“The rumors of my death are only a pending reality.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Death and the Eternal Forever (2014)

Death

“I didn't want to be known as the reality-show star trying to be an actress, so I kept a lot of the failed auditions to myself.”

Jamie Chung (1983) American actress

Star

“The roles that Eastwood has played, and the films that he has directed, cannot be disentangled from the nature of the American culture of the last quarter century, its fantasies and its realities.”

Clint Eastwood (1930) actor and director from the United States

Author Edward Gallafent, commenting on Eastwood's impact on film from the 1970s to 1990s
Gallafent, Edward (1994). Clint Eastwood. p. 10. New York: Continuum. ISBN 0826406653.

Nature

“Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call the reality?”

George MacDonald book Phantastes

not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier?
Phantastes (1858)

“Philosophy of science can bring a strong array of analytical and synthetic tools to questions of ultimate causation, ultimate reality and “the whole of reality” because these questions are both physical and metaphysical—entailing methodological procedures from both science and philosophy.”

Robert Spitzer (priest) (1952) American Jesuit priest, scholar and educator

Can scientific methods prove the existence of God? https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/god-and-science-qa-robert-spitzer-sj (December 29, 2015)

Question, Strong, Science

“He has made use of the insights of these men to develop a perspective on education which is authentically his own and which seeks to respond to the concrete realities of Latin America.”

Paulo Freire book Pedagogy of the Oppressed

As quoted in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2014), p.31
Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)

Men, Education

“Like many who have no reason for pride, that very lack of reason for it made me the prouder. But certain realities have a way of making themselves felt, and debt is one of them.”

Brent Weeks book The Way of Shadows

Source: The Way of Shadows (2008), Chapter 45 (pp. 400-401)

Making love, Way

“I’m not sure there’s really that much of a separation between imagination and reality when it comes to creatures. My inspiration is almost always from something nature has created. Nature is relentless and astonishingly diverse in the amount and variety of life it presents. It’s really what parts you put together and how far from reality you want to go when you design creatures.”

Chris Walas (1955) American special effects artist and film director

Life, Imagination, Nature, Parting

“Each one of us has to take responsibility for reality, and present it so that kids will grow up familiar with that and say, OK. I've seen that before. I'm not afraid of it.”

Thuy Trang (1973–2001) Vietnamese actress (1973-2001)

“So the biggest lesson for me was to write what you want. People are going to have their opinions—good and bad. The reality is you’re not going to please everyone, and if you attempt to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. If anything, you can have fun doing it.”

Jason Tanamor (1975) Filipino-American Author and Writer

Esquire Philippines Interview (2020)

Bad luck, People

“For me, being an actor and being a reggae musician are two flowers blooming from the same root. I see it as my strongest asset in order to make the world a better place. Acting and being a musician is like being an instrument mixing dreams and reality.”

Yōsuke Kubozuka (1979) Japanese actor

Yôsuke Kubozuka Talk ‘Silence’, Martin Scorsese, His Reggae Career, Japan and More http://www.cutprintfilm.com/features/interviews/yosuke-kubozuka/ (March 16, 2017)

World, Making love, Dreams, Flowers

“Large families were really in fashion [in Victorian England], they were seen as a status symbol, they were seen as an example of how the man was very virile. The reality was that, like Victoria, people were pregnant repeatedly. Every three months or so they might fall pregnant, so the average woman was pretty much pregnant or about to be pregnant for most of her early married life.”

Kate Williams (historian) (1974) British historian

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b06hh19v
Peter Snow Returns to the Future: Kate Williams
BBC
16 October 2015
2 May 2021

Life, People, Family, Fashion

“Nothing in reality exists, except God, the Absolute Being.”

Shah Badakhshi Indian poet

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 202

God

“I am not a visual person. I have spent so many bounded years in my childhood that I have grown used to having books as my window on reality.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

In Joy Still Felt (1980), p. 217
General sources

Books, Childhood, Personality

“Most people live in a half-dream all their lives and call it reality.”

John Steinbeck book The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

Appendix, letter to Elizabeth Otis (25 July 1959)
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

People, Dreams

“Let your dreams be the reality of your tomorrow.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Lascia che siano i sogni che hai ad essere la realtà del tuo domani.
Source: prevale.net

Dreams

“Be the exception that lives on reality by destroying appearance.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Siate l'eccezione che vive di realtà distruggendo l'apparenza.
Source: prevale.net

Appearance

“The idiot thinks he is intelligent, cunning, and even an authentic person, when reality proves just the opposite.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) L'idiota pensa di essere intelligente, astuto e persino una persona autentica, quando la realtà dimostra esattamente l'opposto.
Source: prevale.net

Intelligence, Thinking, Personality

“In reality, there is no truth in socialism, because it has never worked. Still smarting from the hard lessons of history, today's Marxist socialists have learned to swiftly bury truth and any truth-seekers, before they can become entombed themselves.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

“No Truth in Socialism: Why the ‘Crisis of Marxism’ Matters” https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/no_truth_in_socialism_why_the_crisis_of_marxism_matters.html American Thinker (Aug. 7, 2021)

Truth, History, Learning

“Here you are invited into the direct experience of that timeless reality through the method of self-inquiry, which forms the essence of this book.”

Mooji (1954) Jamaican spiritual teacher

Greater than Sky, Vaster than Space, (2018), Part I

Books

“Those who discover that reality of their inmost Being enjoy a sense of peace, love, and wisdom as its natural perfume. They experience their essential nature as true freedom.”

Mooji (1954) Jamaican spiritual teacher

Greater than Sky, Vaster than Space, (2018), Part I

Love, Wisdom, Peace, Nature

“The Introductory chords dissolve the dream which the music has evoked, and we are back once more in the world of reality.”

Walter Raymond Spalding (1865–1962) American music pedagogue and author

On the Coda of the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, page 187 https://books.google.com/books?id=pQARAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA187. <br class="br">Music: An Art and a Language (1920), Schumann and Mendelssohn (Ch. XIII)

World, Dreams, Music

“Nothing could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. Now that I am experiencing these things with you in real life, It’s as if these fairy tales left out the most interesting parts of their stories.”

Suraj Sani (1996) Nigerian writer, Spoken word artist

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10937455-nothing-could-have-prepared-me-for-the-reality-of-the/

Life, Parting

“There are two kinds of thoughtforms: those which are mental and those which are the result of man's fears - these are unreal. But they become real, because every thought is real. Even if it is an astral thoughtform, it is still a potent force although it has no essential reality.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Reappearance of the Christ and the Masters of Wisdom (1980)

Fear

“Our party’s experiences and our revolutionary realities have demonstrated that whenever we firmly maintain a spirit of independence and self-reliance we are able to be creative in our development of policies and directions, and we achieve success.”

Lê Duẩn (1907–1986) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam

Speech at 12th Plenum of the Party Central Committee (1 December 1965)

Success

“Over the ages, if we had had a more open attitude to knowledge, to change of consciousness, to change of perception of the possibilities of life and the nature of the reality in which we live, people like Galileo or Copernicus would have had altogether easier lives.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Great Approach (2001)

Life, People, Age, Nature

“The reality of women in Islam is a prefabricated destiny.”

Tariq Ali (1943) British Pakistani writer, journalist, and historian

The Clash of Fundamentalism

Women

“People can be fooled into thinking of mathematics as logical, formal, symbolic reasoning. But this is far from reality...computers are far better at formal computation and formal reasoning, but humans are far better mathematicians.”

William Thurston (1946–2012) mathematician

Foreword to Teichmüller Theory

People, Fools, Mathematics, Thinking

“The people strongly demand an end to the authoritarian system. It has become a stark reality that an authoritarian system can no longer maintain national unity, achieve economic development and preserve national security.”

Roh Tae-woo (1932–2021) Army general and President of South Korea

"Man In The News; A Traveler From Seoul: Roh Tae Woo" in The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/15/world/man-in-the-news-a-traveler-from-seoul-roh-tae-woo.html (15 September 1987)

People

“In the spiritual world, it's only the self-conscious individual that is considered the greatest and not the conqueror of the world. In reality, conquering temptation is the toughest task among them all.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

World

“It doesn't matter what you expected, but you must accept what reality offers to you at the end.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“It seems like we can’t experience reality no matter how hard we try. Because illusion is always waiting at the end of the tunnel.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Waiting

“The truth is that, reality matter more than imaginary things—Your perceptions and concepts of the world doesn't contribute anything to anyone.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Truth, World

“The truth, or rather, reality is far from any human can ever reach.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Truth

“We are becoming more spiritual, in our minds, but in reality, it is the opposite of spiritually that is practised by the mystics.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Everything seems possible during childhood, but things start to change as we age and face the realities of the universe.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Age, Universe, Change, Childhood

“Whenever books seem so boring, it's a good time to turn to nature as the best teacher. This is the true path of spirituality or the discovery of reality.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Books, Nature, Teachers, Time

“Yesterday's science fiction is today's prosaic, everyday reality.”

Garry Davis (1921–2013) American actor turned peace activist (1921-2013)

Letters to World Citizens (2004)

Science

“A symbolism is abstract inasmuch as it signifies a principial reality; it is concrete inasmuch as it communicates the nature of this reality, that is, inasmuch as it renders it present to our experience.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

[2013, From the Divine to the Human, World Wisdom, 82, 978-1-936597-32-1]
Spiritual path, Symbolism

Communication, Nature

“In the elementary sense of the word, faith is our assent to a truth that transcends us; but spiritually speaking, it is our assent, not to transcendent concepts, but to immanent realities, or to Reality as such; now this Reality is our very substance.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

[2019, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, World Wisdom, 234, 978-1-93659765-9]
Spiritual life, Faith

Truth, Faith, Sense

“Oh, history...you’ll be talking about reality next, as if it were something special too.”

Genevieve Cogman (1972) novelist and game designer

Source: The Masked City (2015), Chapter 15 (p. 201)

History

“The utility of a thought experiment is inversely proportional to the size of its departures from reality.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2013)

Departure

“I think anybody who gets to that stage in reality is so beyond self-loathing. If you hate yourself, well, then you're going to turn some of that hatred on the world around you.”

Penn Badgley (1986) American actor and musician

Source: "Penn Badgley Isn't Who You Fans Think He Is" in InStyle https://www.instyle.com/celebrity/penn-badgley-interview-you-2021 (14 October 2021)

Hate, World, Thinking

“Hindus accept no divisions between the believer and unbeliever. Every path leads to Him (God or Reality); there can be as many paths to Him as the number of human. Indeed, the prophetic tradition is alien to Hinduism. Narrowness of the spirit, peculiar to Semitic faiths, has been alien to India.”

Girilal Jain (1924–1993) Indian journalist

Source: The Hindu Phenomenon - By Girilal Jain p 5 -135 - South Asia Books - 1998 ISBN 8174760105

God, Faith

“[O]ne of the great things about science is it forces us to refine our idea of what's common sense. It forces us to have our beliefs conform to the evidence of reality rather than the other way around. The universe may not be like we'd like it to be, but it doesn't really care.”

Lawrence M. Krauss book A Universe from Nothing

"Lawrence Krauss: A Universe from Nothing" (2031) <br class="br">Source: 7:09 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46sKeycH3bE&t=429s

Way, Idea, Sense, Universe

“The Chinese and U.S. economies are inseparable, and that's the reality.”

Wang Qishan (1948) Chinese politician

Source: "China and US economies 'inseparable,' Wang Qishan tells Davos" in Nikkei Asia https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/China-and-US-economies-inseparable-Wang-Qishan-tells-Davos (24 January 2019)

“Word inflation is a problem. You can try to change reality by changing the words, but you can’t. It just stops you from dealing with it. One of the bad guys in Nineteen Eighty-Foursays, ‘The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.’ It’s Orwellian, and Orwell never ends well.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Source: Sen. Chris Coons and Caitlin Flanagan, Natural Immunity, (2021)

Guy, Problem, Change

“To make tomorrow better we must realize tough realities today, to understand the necessity for renunciation.”

Wojciech Jaruzelski (1923–2014) Polish military officer and politician

Excerpts of Martial law speech (14 December 1981)

Understanding

“[J]ustification of power must be the central problem. For it is through this problem alone that freedom and equality—or... justice—can be projected into the social and political reality... But to fascism the problem does not even exist except as a ridiculous relic of "Jewish liberalism."”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 15

Justice, Problem, Freedom

“I believe there is power in the words that we say, and our words have enough creative power such that what we say and believe in our minds & hearts shape our reality.”

Yemi Adamolekun Executive Director of Enough is Enough

Source: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2021/10/nigeria-61-eie-11-light-hope-power-and-voice-opinion/ Speaking about Nigeria (October 18 2021 )

Heart

“We all like to believe that our world has clear heroes and villains and that the heroes are going to save us after all, but that’s not the reality.”

Nanfu Wang (1985) director and filmmaker

Source: "It Didn’t Take Long for Me to Feel Empathy: Nanfu Wang on In the Same Breath" in Roger Ebert https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/it-didnt-take-long-for-me-to-feel-empathy-nanfu-wang-on-in-the-same-breath (17 August 2021)

World

“Was it better to die in the illusion of sunshine and warmth or face death in a cold darkness of reality? Was it better to die in happy ignorance or terrified knowledge? The answer, if you’re a Londoner, is that it’s better not to die at all.”

Ben Aaronovitch book Whispers Under Ground

Source: Whispers Under Ground (2012), Chapter 21, “Oxford Circus” (p. 224)

Death, Happiness, Knowledge

“As of today, a digital identity for Monégasque people and Monaco's residents is becoming a reality. It is allowing for new and safe ways to meet the needs of everyone living in the Principality.”

Pierre Dartout (1954) French official

Source: Pierre Dartout (2021) cited in: " Monaco creates a digital identity for everyone in the Principality https://www.monaco-tribune.com/en/2021/06/monaco-creates-a-digitial-identity-for-everyone-in-the-principality/" in Science Alert, 30 June 2021.

People, Way

“I meet the guy we talked to but, then the sun came up and we're in reality.”

L. J. Smith book Vampire Diaries

“We’re clusters of chemical reactions that contemplate deep truths about the nature of reality.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve (2018), p. 15

Truth, Nature

“The country is very diverse, geographically, ethnically, so the reality that the bishops have on the coast, in the mountains, or in the jungle is very different.”

Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne (1943) Catholic cardinal

Source: Pope Francis will see a lively faith in Peru and Chile, Lima's cardinal says https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/37324/pope-francis-will-see-a-lively-faith-in-peru-and-chile-limas-cardinal-says (5 December 2017)

Mountain, Country

“The travesty exists only because reliance upon abstraction has made reality incomprehensible to you.”

Jack Vance book The Gray Prince

Source: The Gray Prince (1975 [serialized 1974]), Chapter 16 (p. 159)

“As we ring in the New Year, we hope that it will bring new opportunities for us. Of course, we hope luck will be on our side, but we understand that making our dreams reality primarily depends on us, on what we prioritise in our daily lives, on our ability to commit to our projects and achieve concrete, tangible results.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

2021

Dreams, Hope, Understanding, Dependency

“The physical and the virtual will seamlessly meld before our very eyes creating an augmented life called spatial reality.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Future Proofing You (2021)

Life

“Spatial reality will be as vital to the success of a two-person startup as it is to the largest multinational conglomerate.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Future Proofing You (2021)

Success, Personality

“The reality is; there is something which exist but what that something is; remains a question. Either because we are not capable to reveal it yet or because with time and movement it changes itself and has no truth in it. But what’s the reason for its existence without having or revealing any truth, that’s the evidence we need to find.”

Zaman Ali (1993) Pakistani philosopher

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11085116-the-reality-is-there-is-something-which-exist-but-what

Truth, Question, Change, Time

“I would like everyone to understand that the Church in this society is not a foreign element but a profoundly domestic reality that truly wants the good for each person. We hope to find agreement and a suitable response from the other side.”

Josip Mrzljak (1944) Croatian Roman Catholic bishop

Source: Josip Mrzljak Appointed as the New Bishop of Varaždin https://ika.hkm.hr/english/josip-mrzljak-appointed-as-the-new-bishop-of-varazdin/ (2007)

Hope, Understanding, Personality

“The hardest thing in life is to face reality when you grow up being educated by myths.”

Ralph Nader (1934) American consumer rights activist and corporate critic

Policy Talks@Google (2008)

Life, Education

“A time came when the Catholics, having long relied on force, were compelled to appeal to opinion. That which had been defiantly acknowledged and defended required to be ingeniously explained away. The same motive which had justified the murder now prompted the lie. Men shrank from the conviction that the rulers and restorers of their Church had been murderers and abetters of murder, and that so much infamy had been coupled with so much zeal. They feared to say that the most monstrous of crimes had been solemnly approved at Rome, lest they should devote the Papacy to the execration of mankind. A swarm of facts were invented to meet the difficulty: The victims were insignificant in number; they were slain for no reason connected with religion; the Pope believed in the existence of the plot; the plot was a reality; the medal is fictitious; the massacre was a feint concerted with the Protestants themselves; the Pope rejoiced only when he heard that it was over. These things were repeated so often that they have been sometimes believed; and men have fallen into this way of speaking whose sincerity was unimpeachable, and who were not shaken in their religion by the errors or the vices of Popes. Möhler was pre-eminently such a man. In his lectures on the history of the Church, which were published only last year, he said that the Catholics, as such, took no part in the massacre; that no cardinal, bishop, or priest shared in the councils that prepared it; that Charles informed the Pope that a conspiracy had been discovered; and that Gregory made his thanksgiving only because the King's life was saved. Such things will cease to be written when men perceive that truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.”

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

Source: 1860s, The Massacre Of St. Bartholomew (1869)

Life, Men, Truth, Lie

“Language has become the universal evil. And we can certainly see why. What characterizes any word is its difference from the thing – the fact that, taken in itself, in its own reality, language contains nothing of the reality of the thing, none of its properties. This difference from the thing explains its indifference to the thing. Since a word has nothing in itself that is identical or similar to what is in the thing, it could as well be united with any other thing whatever. One could use the same name for two different things or else attribute several names to the same thing. But because, in and of itself, the word contains nothing that is real and ignores everything about that reality, it could just as well bring reality back to itself, identify with it, define it, in such a way that everything the word says becomes reality, and pretends to stand for it. Emerging from its own powerlessness, the power of language suddenly becomes frightening, shaking up reality, twisting it up in its frenzy.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Books on Religion and Christianity, I am the Truth. Toward a philosophy of Christianity (1996)
Source: Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 9

Way, Universe, Evil, Indifference