As quoted in "Václav Havel: Heir to a Spiritual Legacy" by Richard L. Stanger in Christian Century (11 April 1990) http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=767
Context: It's not hard to stand behind one's successes. But to accept responsibility for one's failures... that is devishly hard! But only thence does the road lead... to a radically new insight into the mysterious gravity of my existence as an uncertain enterprise and to its transcendental meaning.
“That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.”
Source: Sputnik Sweetheart
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Haruki Murakami 655
Japanese author, novelist 1949Related quotes
“Reality is reality. It is the way things are, not the way you want them to be in your head.”
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cerebus/message/108250
Dave Sim's Collected Letters Volume 2 (2007)
Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 51-52
Context: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and those who followed them accurately foresaw this growing split between truth and reality in Western culture, and they endeavored to call Western man back from the delusion that reality can be comprehended in an abstracted, detached way. But though they protested vehemently against arid intellectualism, they were by no means simple activists. Nor were they antirational. Anti-intellectualism and other movements in our day which make thinking subordinate to acting must not at all be confused with existentialism. Either alternative-making man subject or object-results in loosing the living, existing person.
With regard to this fundamental principle, as we have now declared and adopted it without farther definition or limitation, this third Age is precisely similar to that which is to follow it, the fourth, or age of Reason as Science,—and by virtue of this similarity prepares the way for it. Before the tribunal of Science, too, nothing is accepted but the Conceivable. Only in the application of the principle there is this difference between the two Ages,—that the third, which we shall shortly name that of Empty Freedom, makes its fixed and previously acquired conceptions the measure of existence; while the fourth—that of Science—on the contrary, makes existence the measure, not of its acquired, but of its desiderated beliefs.
Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 19
“What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them.”
Source: Sisterhood Everlasting
“Seek out reality, leave things that seem.”
Source: The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), Vacillation http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1751/, VII
“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 229
Paper Towns (2008)