Quotes about reality

page 8

“Change
is the one unavoidable,
irresistible,
ongoing reality of the universe.
To us,
that makes it the most powerful reality,
and just another word for
God.

Earthseed: The Books of the Living
Lauren Oya Olamina”

“Deanna's voice softened. "Theresa, I know there's a part of you that believes you can change someone, but the reality is that you can't. You can change yourself, and Garrett can change himself, but you can't do it for him."”

“Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away.”

“That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?”

“Illusion is Reality's coy lover who cheers him when he is grim. Illusion is cunning to his wisdom of ages, weet oblivion to his knowledge. A bounty to his lack. [Sabine]”

“Don't base reality on what you have seen when you have seen very little.”

“Often, to be free means the ability to deal with the realities of one's own situation so as not to be overcome by them.”

“Only happy people have nightmares, from overeating. For those who live a nightmare reality, sleep is a black hole, lost in time, like death.”

“Remember: He WANTS your fellowship, and He has done everything possible to make it a reality. He has forgiven your sins, at the cost of His own dear Son. He has given you His Word, and the priceless privilege of prayer and worship.”

“A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether.”

“Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.”

“Your children will smash your understanding, knowledge and reality. You will be better off. Then they will leave. You'll miss them forever.”

“Poetry is the deification of reality.”

“Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.”

“The image isn't reality. Even though we're used to thinking that way alot of the time. We show a kid a picture of a dog and say 'This is a doggie' - but it's not. It's just an image.”

“That's the thing about being a victim; you start to think it'll happen to you on a regular basis. It's living with the reality of your own vulnerability, and it sucks.”

“In reality, you don’t ever change the hurricane. You just learn how to stay out of its path.”

“Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.”

“Insane is such an ugly word, a voice in my head said. Think of it as obtaining a new look at reality.”

“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”

“Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality… Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense.”

“Only psychos and shamans create their own reality”

“In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagines past”

“To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

“What keeps me interested--and it always does--is how can she be a bad actress on film but a good one in reality?”

“I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.”

“The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand”

“Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.”

“As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.”

“and both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday & eternal reality was love…”

“An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law”

“The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.”

“Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.”

“Stupid dreams. Even the good ones are bad, because they remind you how poorly reality measures up.”

“The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning.”

“He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.”

“If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.”

“We all live in a kind of continuous dream,” I told him. “When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.”

“Long since, the desert wind wiped away our footprints in the sand. But at every second of my existence, I remember what happened, and you still walk in my dreams and in my reality. Thank you for having crossed my path.”

“The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.”

“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.”

“The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.”

“It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams”

“Welcome to the worst nightmare of all, reality!”

“Temptation said that we all dream of committing crimes, but that only the unbalanced make that macabre idea a reality.”

“What else do I have to offer? Nothing happens to me anymore. That’s the reality of getting old, and I guess that’s really the crux of the matter. I’m not ready to be old yet.”

“What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”

“Ugliness is an illusion, gentlemen. Like beauty. Like color. All depends on the light. The only reality is action.”

“We have been told over and over that "you can't change human nature", but the study of emic realities shows quite the contrary, that almost anything can become "human nature" if society defines it as such.”

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.”

“Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment--the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the wall down at the local madhouse.”

“Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.”

“Your mind creates your reality. If you expect nothing, you open up the universe to give you options. If you expect the worst, you usually get it.”

“To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is.”

“Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.”

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”

“The brutal reality of politics would be probably intolerable without drugs.”

“And her sleep was too long and deep for that:so deep that she left her normal reality behind.”

“Like the teens I worked with, I understood the need for miracles--they kept reality from paralyzing you”

“The trouble with fiction… is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”

“Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.”

“There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.”

“The human mind has a primitive ego defince mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It's called denial.”

“To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”

“I taught him, 'he quavered, "to trust in love. I said:'when love comes, that is reality.' I said: 'Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.”

“When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.”

“Everyone lives bound by their own knowledge and awareness. They define that as reality; but knowledge and awareness are vage, and perhaps better called illusions.”

“Always mind the distance between your dreams and your reality.”

“Always remember, your focus determines your reality.”

“Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.”

“The real reality is there, but everything you KNOW about “it” is in your mind and your
to do with as you like. Conceptualization is art, and YOU ARE THE ARTIST”

“The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.”

“It’s easy to want peace and love in hypothetical situations—then reality sets in, and sometimes we have to do what’s ugly.”

“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.”

“I thought the morning would bring change. But I should have known that it doesn't take that long for change to happen - it takes a second. A moment. In a single breath, reality as you know it can simply fall away.”

“She intended to swallow the world and he lived crushed by reality.”

“The acceptance of the reality that we are in the Lord's loving hands is only a recognition that we have never really been anywhere else.”

“… people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.”

“Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went.”

“We were, the two of us, still fragmentary beings, just beginning to sense the presence of an unexpected, to be-aquired reality that would fill us and make us whole.”

“People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.”

“As if we’d have sex in a cave surrounded by hordes of demons. This is reality, not your fevered imagination.”

“This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.”

“You write in order to change the world… if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”

“I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.”

“I say “Out” to every negative thought that comes to my mind. No person, place, or thing has any power over me, for I am the only thinker in my mind. I create my own reality and everyone in it.”

“I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.”

“Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.”

“In my heart I know the truth, but my mind cannot accept the reality of what this all means.”

“First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.”

“Wizard's Ninth Rule
A contradiction can not exist in reality. Not in part, nor in whole.”

“Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions, inside the walls of a hospital… Doubt is like dye. Once is spreads into the fabric of excuses you've woven, you'll never get rid of the stain.”

“Hope is the denial of reality. - Raistlin”

“I had been experiencing brief flashes of disassociation, or shallow states of non-ordinary reality.”

“A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind.”

“There's nothing so attractive as a blank slate. Take one attractive man, slap on a thick coat of daydream, and voila, the perfect man. With absolutely no resemblance to reality.”

“To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.”

“She [Melanie] is the only dream I ever had that lived and breathed and did not die in the face of reality.”

“But life is not a legend or a story. Reality is far more precious than a story…”