Quotes on Reality

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.

A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.

Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe?

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

[...] the inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race [...]

Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.

In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.

You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.

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.

Only psychos and shamans create their own reality

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing

Don't wake up a woman in love. Let her dream, so that she does not weep when she returns to her bitter reality

When you srgue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.

One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?

Reality whistles a different tune underwater.

Invisible things are the only realities.

Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.

What incensed him the most was the blatant jokes of the ones that passed it all off as a jest, pretending to understand everything and in reality not knowing their own minds.