Quotes about Reality
Most popular reality quotes
Concepts and ideas are incapable of expressing reality as it is... Most of our suffering arises from our ideas and concepts. If you are able to free yourself from these concepts, anxiety and fear will disappear.
You are a miracle, capable of creating in the likeness of your Creator. Everything else is your own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the creations of light are real.
If you were to meet a termite, to state that his or her goal in life was the perfect modeling of the cosmos, you would think it was quite a comic undertaking. And yet how different are we that we should presume to more than a shadow of the truth.
Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn't the dream destroy reality?
I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?
Be it life or death, we seek only reality.
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
The reality of any place is what its people remember of it.
The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.
One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.
The word "suchness" describes reality as it is. Concepts and ideas are incapable of expressing reality as it is. Nirvana, the ultimate reality, cannot be described, because it is free of all concepts and ideas. Nirvana is the extinction of all concepts. Most of our suffering arises from our ideas and concepts. If you are able to free yourself from these concepts, anxiety and fear will disappear. Nirvana, the ultimate reality, or God, is of the nature of no-birth and no-death. It is total freedom.
Since the initial publication of the charged electromagnetic spectrum, humans learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear...is less than one millionth of reality.
Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.
A hallucination is a species of reality.
Outside is pure energy and colorless substance, all of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
It is inconceivable that anything should be existing.
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
All our previous positions are now exposed as absurd. But people don't draw the obvious conclusion: it must also mean then that our present situation is absurd.
Our separate fictions add up to joint reality.
Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.
Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.
Things are symbols of themselves.
There's no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. It's only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?
You live your life as if it's real.
To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.
Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and the more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.
It is notorious that illusions are shattered by conflict with reality, so no real happiness, no real wit, no real profundity are tolerated where the illusion prevails.
Without our knowing it, we see reality through glasses colored by the subconscious memory of previous experiences.
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
Reality is for people who lack imagination.
It is a narrow little house which becomes a prison to those who can't get out of it.
Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away.
Human kind Cannot bear very much reality.
What is reality anyway! It's nothing but a collective hunch.
You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
The common worldview, shared by most humans, is that there is one objective reality, and we humans can understand that reality through a rigorous application of facts and reason. This view of the world imagines that some people have already achieved a fact-based type of enlightenment that is compatible with science and logic, and they are trying to help the rest of us see the world the "right" way. As far as I can tell, most people share that interpretation of the world. The only wrinkle with that worldview is that we all think we are the enlightened ones. And we assume the people who disagree with us just need better facts, and perhaps better brains, in order to agree with us. That filter on life makes most of us happy.
Humans think they are rational, and they think they understand their reality. But they are wrong on both counts.
I have no reason to believe humans evolved with the capability to understand their reality. That capability was not important to survival. When it comes to evolution, any illusion that keeps us alive long enough to procreate is good enough.
The grand illusion of life is that our minds have the capacity to understand reality. But human minds didn't evolve to understand reality. We didn't need that capability. A clear view of reality wasn't necessary for our survival. Evolution cares only that you survive long enough to procreate. And that's a low bar. The result is that each of us is, in effect, living in our own little movie that our brain has cooked up for us to explain our experiences
Reality is always controlled by the people who are the most insane.
Free yourself from the shackles of an oppressive reality. What's real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won't necessarily understand why it worked.
All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate ways. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.
As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it – and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it.
Reality is neutral. Our reactions reflect back and create our world.
