Quotes on Reality

Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.

The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

The director’s task is to recreate life, its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of the truth he has seen, even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable. Of course an artist can lose his way, but even his mistakes are interesting provided they are sincere. For they represent the reality of his inner life, of the peregrinations and struggle into which the external world has thrown him.

To come to know that nothing is good, nothing is bad, is a turning point; it is a conversion. You start looking in; the outside reality loses meaning. The social reality is a fiction, a beautiful drama; you can participate in it, but then you don’t take it seriously. It is just a role to be played; play it as beautifully, as efficiently, as possible. But don’t take it seriously, it has nothing of the ultimate in it.

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?

Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.

Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.

Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.

Reality is very, very contradictory, and so I try to write just perfecting what I see, what I read, what I feel, in a feel-thinking way. Not only giving ideas, or receiving ideas, or trying to explain something, but mainly feel-thinking, a feel-thinking language able to tie the heart and the mind, which have been divorced.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.

It is not good enough for things to be planned - they still have to be done; for the intention to become a reality, energy has to be launched into operation.

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death... these are things that unite us all.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.

There’s no remaking reality... Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.

[T]he essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change. The growing man is Man Alive, and his "philosophy" must grow, must flow, with him. . . . the man too fixed today, unfixed tomorrow - and his body of beliefs is nothing but a series of fixations.

In the future I'm going to devote less time to sentimentality and more time to reality.

I do value my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great - ideas, work - it's all dust and ashes.

Steve has a reality distortion field.” When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.