A consensus reality is often misleading.
A man loses contact with reality if he is not surrounded by his books.
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion.
All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.
All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.
All laws are simulations of reality.
All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world.
All speech, action and behavior are fluctuations of consciousness. All life emerges from, and is sustained in, consciousness. The whole universe is the expression of consciousness. The reality of the universe is one unbounded ocean of consciousness in motion.
All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is 'important' in the sense of being 'worthy of being known.'
Americans have an abiding belief in their ability to control reality by purely material means... airline insurance replaces the fear of death with the comforting prospect of cash.
An intense anticipation itself transforms possibility into reality; our desires being often but precursors of the things which we are capable of performing.
An open society such as ours is based on the recognition that our understanding of reality is inherently imperfect. Nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth.
And if you ever do a survey, you'll find that people prefer illusion to reality, ten to one. Twenty, even.
And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
Any business plan won't survive its first encounter with reality. The reality will always be different. It will never be the plan.
Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from reality.
Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters.
Appearance too often takes the place of reality- the stamp of the coin is there, and the glitter of the gold, but, after all, it is but a worthless wash.
Arnold Schwarznegger is the governor of California and we are not even on LSD. I don't see why people bother taking drugs anymore. When reality has become a hallucination, what do you need to hallucinate for?
Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.
Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.
Art is magic... But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality; it is a hammer used to shape it.
Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
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.
Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication.
Before you get mugged by reality, take out an insurance policy.
Behind every myth lies a truth; beyond every legend is reality, as radiant (sometimes as chilling) as the story itself.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
Care like hell! Sit around the bars and drink, and pose, and pretend, all you want to, but in reality, deep down underneath, care like hell.
Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.
Cheap liquor is a magic potion that can turn you into a puppet cowboy before it kills you.If the victories we create in our heads were let loose on reality, the world we know would drown in blazing happiness.
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
Civilized 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.
Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.
Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak.
Comparison more than reality makes men happy or wretched.
Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values.
Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.
Crying that it's an application bug is like crying over the speed of light: you should deal with reality, not what you wish reality was.
Deep down you want to think that people are really good- but the reality outweighs that.
Depending on the reality one must face, one may prefer to opt for illusion.
Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality.
Dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality.
Don't get stuck in old ideas. Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change.
Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word 'water' is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.
Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.
Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.
Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.
Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.
Everyone is a theologian, either conscious or unconscious, in the sense that everyone has some conception of the nature of reality, of the demands of reality, and of those elements in reality that support or threaten meaningful existence.
Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open, and that in his youth, and so try to test his ideas on reality.
Everyone with a cell phone thinks they're a photographer. Everyone with a laptop thinks they're a journalist. But they have no training, and they have no idea of what we keep to in terms of standards, as in what's far out and what's reality. And they have no dedication to truth.
Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable.
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
Evil I had never found satisfactorily placeable as an integral element of the universal, or total, content of existence. Indeed, evil is evil just because there is no logical place for it, no room in reality for it. It is unreal, and yet real as something unreal.
Expectations should not always be taken as reality; because you never know when you will be disappointed.
Face it: a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
Failure to understand reality is not reality's fault.
Fancy tortures more people than does reality.
Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.
Fearful as reality is, it is less fearful than evasions of reality. Look steadfastly into the slit, pinpointed malignant eyes of reality as an old-hand trainer dominates his wild beasts.
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
For children to live only in contact with concrete and steel and wires and wheels and machines and computers and plastics, to seldom experience any primordial reality or even to see the stars at night, is soul deprivation that diminishes the deepest of their human experiences.
For my part, I find the attempt to ban any naturally growing plant to be an attack on reality, and a denial of some of the most basic freedoms. I guess that's why today's GOP is so in favor of it.
For to dream and then to return to reality only means that our qualms suffer a change of place and significance.
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
God is a fiction invented by people so they do not have to face the reality of their condition.
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.
Good writers don't reflect reality. They change it.
Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given.
Happiness equals reality minus expectations.
Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable.
He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality.
He who thinks he is raising a mound may only in Reality be digging a pit.
History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of history becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.
Hitting the delete key and changing the channel are satisfying but ineffective methods of denying reality.
Honorable beginnings should serve to awaken curiosity, not to heighten people's expectations. We are much better off when reality surpasses our expectations, and something turns out better than we thought it would.
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Hope is not a dream but a way of making dreams become reality.
Hope is the denial of reality.
How can we be sure that our smug conceptions of reality actually exist? To one man in a million dreadful knowledge is revealed, and the rest of us remain mercifully ignorant.
How our story has been divided up among the truth-telling professions! Religion, philosophy, history, poetry, compete with each other for our ears; and science competes with all together. And for each we have a different set of ears. But, though we hear much, what we are told is as nothing: none of it gives us ourselves, rather each story-kind steals us to make its reality of us.
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
I accept reality and dare not question it.
I also believe that when one dies, one may wake up to the reality that proves that time does not exist.
I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our 'creations,' are simply the notes of our observations.
I believe that the fundamental alternative for man is the choice between 'life' and 'death;' between creativity and destructive violence; between reality and illusions; between objectivity and intolerance; between brotherhood-independence and dominance-submission.
I believe that the only reality is how we treat each other. The morality comes from the absence of any grander scheme, not from the presence of any grander scheme.
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
I believe that we form our own lives, that we create our own reality, and that everything works out for the best.
I can handle reality in small doses, but as a lifestyle it's much too confining.
I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong.
I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible.
I don't deny reality, but I don't exactly go looking for it, either.
I don't mind being in touch with reality as long as I don't have to live there.(from the comic strip Frank and Ernest).
I don't think there is any difference between fantasy and reality in the way these should be approached in a film. Of course if you live that way you are clinically insane.
I enjoy reality as much as the next man. It's just that in my case, fortunately, reality includes a good stiff belt every now and then.
I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother's poor mental health.
I have always felt that laughter in the face of reality is probably the finest sound there is and will last until the day when the game is called on account of darkness. In this world, a good time to laugh is any time you can.
I have never yielded to reality. That's what science fiction is all about.
I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming. I always use what remains of my dreams of the night before. Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can't be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process.
I like reality. It tastes like bread.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed.
I submit that an individual who breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.
I tend to admire dead people more than the living. All too often, human reality diminishes the glowing reputation.
I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's all finally about.
Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.
If the victories we create in our heads were let loose on reality, the world we know would drown in blazing happiness.
If you don't change, reality in the end forces that change upon you.
If you integrate fantasy with reality, you do not instantiate reality. If you mix cow pie with apple pie, it does not make the cow pie taste better; it makes the apple pie worse.
If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
Ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal. People who delight in torturing defenseless children or tiny creatures are in reality insane. The terrible thing is that people who are madmen in private may wear a totally bland and innocent expression in public.
Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality.
In a world where celebrity equals talent, and where make-believe is called reality, it is most important to have real love, truth and stability in your life.
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.
In our society to admit inferiority is to be a fool, and to admit superiority is to be an outcast. Those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.
In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.
In reality it is far less prejudicial to witness the immorality of the great than to witness that immorality which leads to greatness.
In reality there are as many religions as there are individuals.
In reality there is no cause or effect, there is only the indifference of the universe.
In reality, serendipity accounts for one percent of the blessings we receive in life, work and love. The other 99 percent is due to our efforts.
In so far as theories of mathematics speak about reality, they are not certain, and in so far as they are certain, they do not speak about reality.
In war, character and opinion make more than half of the reality.
Increasingly, the picture of our society as rendered in our media is illusionary and delusionary: disfigured, unreal, out of touch with reality, disconnected from the true context of our life. It is disfigured by celebrity, by celebrity worship, by gossip, by sensationalism, by denial of our societies
Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit- it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination.
It is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today.
It is always hard when reality intrudes on belief.
It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises; but only performance is reality.
It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.
It is important to make a dream of life and a dream reality.
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.
It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop.
It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.
It will come as a surprise to many, but governments cannot suspend reality.
It's important to abolish the unconscious dogmatism that makes people think their way of looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing the world.
It's my belief that sanity lies in realizing that reality is not exactly what we had in mind.
It's not denial. I'm just very selective about what I accept as reality.
(From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes)
(From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes)
It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.
Justice, however, never was in reality administered gratis in any country. Lawyers and attornies, at least, must always be paid by the parties; and, if they were not, they would perform their duty still worse than they actually perform it.
Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.
Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
Let me get this straight. You're typing on a keyboard made from oil and refined metals, watching the letters come up on a light-emitting screen, in order to use a few grams of silicon etched finer than the eye can see with hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of tiny quantum-mechanical devices, in order to send a message that will travel via optical cables (and possibly satellite links), to be read by thousands of people across the whole world, all of whom could reply within a few hours, and you are actually saying, I mean really actually truly making the claim, that science has no special relation to observed reality?!?
I give up.
I give up.
Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.
Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality...
Life is a toy made of glass; it appears to be of inestimable price, but in reality it is very cheap.
Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil, and that is what our pictures attempt to do.
Literature, whether handed down by word of mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.
Logic and morality made it impossible to accept an illogical and immoral reality; they engendered a rejection of reality which as a rule led the cultivated man rapidly to despair.
Long live transfinite mountains, the hollow earth, time machines, fractal writing, aliens, dada, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, teleportation, artificial reality, robots, pod people, hylozoism, endless shrinking, intelligent goo, antigravity, surrealism, software highs, two-dimensional time, gnarly computation, the art of photo composition, pleasure zappers, nanomachines, mind viruses, hyperspace, monsters from the deep and, of course, always and forever, the attack of the giant ants!
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.
Man does not see reality as it is, but only as he perceives it, and his perception may be mistaken or biased.
Many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather bring about his own ruin than his preservation.
Maybe we should recall the enterprise of science, 'reality.'
Measure not by the scale of perfection the meager product of reality.
Media people should have long noses like an elephant to smell out politicians, mayors, prime ministers and businessmen. We need to know the reality, the good and the bad, not just the appearance.
Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.
Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show a truly staggering ability to 'ignore' certain kinds of information- that which does not 'fit' their imprinted/conditioned reality-tunnel. We generally call this 'conservatism' or 'stupidity,' but it appears in all parts of the political spectrum, and in learned societies as well as in the Ku Klux Klan.
Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage.
Music has the capacity to create a greater reality.
My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.
My greatest enemy is reality. I have fought it successfully for thirty years.
Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.
Neither wisdom nor good will is now dominant. Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.
Never let someone's opinion become your reality. Never sacrifice who you are because someone else has a problem with it.
New Years Eve: when the beautiful promise of tomorrow is transformed into the ugly reality of today, and the disgusting miasma of now becomes the rosy nostalgic netherworlds of yesterday.
(Fusco Brothers comic strip).
(Fusco Brothers comic strip).
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
No policy is worth anything outside of reality.
No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.
Nobody has seen the trekking birds take their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or rivers break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.
Nothing can deceive unless it bears a plausible resemblance to reality.
Of course, contrary to what other kids said, we did know the difference between fantasy and reality. But we also knew the most precious gift secret of all: that reality matters not if you cannot dream; and that all dreams are rooted in truth and speak the language of truth as they unfold in all their splendor.
Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.
Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.
Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos.
Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends.
Our intention creates our reality.
Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.
Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we're in- the one that we think is reality.
Our present picture of physical reality, particularly in relation to the nature of time, is due for a grand shake up.
Our subconscious minds have no sense of humor, play no jokes and cannot tell the difference between reality and an imagined thought or image. What we continually think about eventually will manifest in our lives.
Our thoughts create our reality- where we put our focus is the direction we tend to go.
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
Paranoia's just reality on a finer scale.
(from Strange Days)
(from Strange Days)
People take reality for granted.
People use democracy as a free-floating abstraction disconnected from reality. Democracy in and of itself is not necessarily good. Gang rape, after all, is democracy in action.
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
Perfection never exists in reality, but only in our dreams and, if we are foolish enough to think so, in the past.
Pessimists... have the better sense of humor, for they have a livelier apprehension of pretension and absurdity. In a meritocracy, furthermore, those who fail must either indulge in elaborate mental contortions to disguise reality from themselves or sink into a deep melancholy.
Poor planning or poor execution of plans is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality.
Power is supposed to be so corrupt. I don't think it's so much corrupt, in the usual sense of the word, as stupid and unrealistic. The more power a person has, the further he gets from reality.
Reality and fantasy, we need both of those to survive. If we don't have fantasy, dreams and all of those things, what's the point of carrying on? And you need to watch out for reality because buses come.
Reality continues to ruin my life.
(From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes)
(From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes)
Reality goes bounding past the satirist like a cheetah laughing as it lopes ahead of the greyhound.
Reality has a sliding floor.
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Reality is a creation of our excesses.
Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.
Reality is a narrow little house which becomes a prison to those who can't get out of it.
Reality is a word with many meanings.
Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.
Reality is always controlled by the people who are most insane.
Reality is always harder than it looks.
Reality is always more conservative than ideology.
Reality is an incompressible computation by a fractal cellular automaton of inconceivable dimensions.
Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.
Reality is frequently inaccurate.
Reality is hard. It is no walk in the park, this thing called Life.
Reality is in the observations, not in the electron.
Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves.
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
Reality is only just a word.
Reality is reality. It transcends every concept. There is no concept which can adequately describe it, not even the concept of interdependence.
Reality is something you rise above.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Reality is the completion of experience.
Reality is the most effective mask of reality. Our fondest wish, attained, ceases to be our fondest wish. Success is the greatest of disappointments. The spirit is most alive when it is lost.
Reality is the other person's idea of how things should be.
Reality is the ultimate illusion.
Reality is what I see, not what you see.
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
Reality must prove itself again and again to questioners... it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself.
Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.
Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple.
Reality TV is anything but.
Reality was once a primitive form of crowd control that got out of hand.
Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.
Reality, to me, is not so much something that you perceive, but something you make.
Reality: what a concept!
Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is 'Thou shalt not question.'
Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
See things as you would have them be instead of as they are.
Seek out reality, leave things that seem.
Set up as an ideal the facing of reality as honestly and as cheerfully as possible.
Several unions have agreed to larger employee contributions for their members. Taxpayers are living with cuts and making sacrifices to deal with the reality of California's budget crisis, state workers are going to have to do the same.
So it is useless to evade reality, because it only makes it more virulent in the end.
So often, happiness is the extent to which we balance our grandiose expectations with reality.
Social protest and even civil disobedience serve the law's need for growth. Ideally, reform would come according to reason and justice without self-help and disturbing, almost violent, forms of protest... Still, candor compels one here again to acknowledge the gap between the ideal and the reality. Short of the millennium, sharp changes in the law depend partly upon the stimulus of protest.
Socializing on the internet is to socializing, what reality TV is to reality.
Some days you need to look reality in the eye, and deny it.
Some forms of reality are so horrible we refuse to face them, unless we are trapped into it by comedy. To label any subject unsuitable for comedy is to admit defeat.
Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
Step outside the guidelines of the official umpires and make your own rules and your own reality.
Stock market bubbles don't grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality, but reality as distorted by a misconception.
Surely one of the most visible lessons taught by the twentieth century has been the existence, not so much of a number of different realities, but of a number of different lenses with which to see the same reality.
Teachings that defy reason defy reality; what defies reality defies life. Defying life is embracing death.
Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.
The 'paradox' is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality 'ought to be.'
The appearance of competence may count for more than the reality, and it is a lifework to manufacture appearance or, more usually, to adapt to the common expectation.
The appearance of reality is more important than reality.
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
The best antidote to prejudice is reality.
The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.
The closeness of reality and the distance of myth, because if there is no distance you aren't amazed, and if there is no closeness you aren't moved.
The conception of objective reality... has thus evaporated... into the transparent clarity of mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.
The consumer society is so all-pervasive today that it is easy to assume it has always existed. Yet in reality it is one of the more recent innovations that propelled the West ahead of the Rest. Its most striking characteristic is its seemingly irresistible appeal... The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity.
The crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal?
The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.
The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.
The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.
The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
The first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.
The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.
The herculean task of a photographer is to capture a momentary frame as beautiful in reality, as it would be in a dream.
The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.
The imagination is not a faculty for the creation of illusion; it is the faculty by which alone man apprehends reality. The 'illusion' turns out to be truth.
The intellectual's struggle to deny the obvious is never more desperate than when reality is unpleasant and at variance with his preconceptions and when full acknowledgment of it would undermine the foundations of his intellectual worldview.
The layman always means, when he says reality that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.
The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left's on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality.
The lowest form of popular culture- lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives- has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.
The Man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that Substance is the Great Impostor.
The mass of mankind is divided into two classes- the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals; and, the Don Quixotes, with a sense for ideals, but mad.
The moment is the sole reality.
The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved; it is a reality to be experienced.
The mystic and the physicist arrive at the same conclusion; one starting from the inner realm, the other from the outer world. The harmony between their views confirms the ancient Indian wisdom that Brahman, the ultimate reality without, is identical to Atman, the reality within.
The natural superiority of women is a biological fact, and a socially acknowledged reality.
The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins with the eyes of the beholder, through imagination, invention and confrontation.
The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye.
The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality.
The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
The point of life is to find the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality.
The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another.
The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.
The problem with reality is the lack of a soundtrack.
The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Existence is devoid of plot, theme, and most of all moral.
The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we, too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture!
The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.
The reality of any place is what its people remember of it.
The reality we live in is selected by our conceptual definitions. You and I may be in the same physical space, but each of us will see it as entirely different.
The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic.
The stone that Dr. Johnson once kicked to demonstrate the reality of matter has become dissipated in a diffuse distribution of mathematical probabilities. The ladder that Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz erected in order to scale the heavens rests upon a continually shifting, unstable foundation.
The sun is still there... even if clouds drift over it. Once you have experienced the reality of sunshine you may weep, but you will never feel ice about your heart again.
The theory changes the reality it describes.
The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great- a little understood thing.
The trouble with reality is it's never the way you imagine it.
The ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two.
The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.
The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple 'first' things.
The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.
The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.
Theoretical approaches have their place and are, I suppose, essential but a theory must be tempered with reality.
There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, Business as usual. But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.
(Life of Pi).
(Life of Pi).
There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.
There is a difference between denying reality and avoiding it whenever possible.
There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality.
There is a permanent amnesia planted in us, which just as we keep forgetting our dreams, we sometimes keep on forgetting our reality.
There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.
There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.
There is no joy greater than soaring high on the wings of your dreams, except maybe the joy of watching a dreamer who has nowhere to land but in the ocean of reality.
There is no such thing as pointless violence... It's reality.
There's no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
Those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.
Threesomes are a lot like Communism- they're a great idea on paper but in reality they rarely work well.
Time and memory are true artists; they remold reality nearer to the heart's desire.
To deal with the problems of modern society, hard thought, confrontation with an often unpleasant reality, and moral courage are needed, for which a vague and self-congratulatory broadmindedness is no substitute.
To me, absurdity is the only reality.
To restore a sense of reality, I think Walt Disney should have a Hardluckland.
To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is.
Today is all we have, tomorrow is a mirage that may never become reality.
Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.
Together, we can make a U.S. Department of Peace into a reality, and leave a gift of peace for generations to come.
Too far a retreat from reality is insanity.
Too many moralists begin with a dislike of reality.
Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
Too much positive is either scared or stupid or both. Reality is uncertain.
Travel is the sherbet between courses of reality.
Truth is as subjective as reality.
(from the TV series The X-Files).
(from the TV series The X-Files).
Trying to describe the world, trying to describe the cosmos, trying to put it down in neat orderly fashion, unlike reality. And it always seems to stick in one's mind more than reality does.
TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I've ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.
TV networks are dying. The death throes of religion give us jihads. The death throes of television give us reality shows.
Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another.
Unilateral tolerance in a world of intolerance is like unilateral disarmament in a world of armed camps: it regards hope as a better basis for policy than reality.
Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality.
Until a child can meet reality, he must live in fantasy. But he must create his own fantasy. And it is television's primary damage that it provides ten million children with the same fantasy, ready-made and on a platter.
Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.
Washington, DC is 12 square miles bordered by reality.
We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.
We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.
We are living at the intersection of reality and satire.
We cannot let colorblindness become myopia which masks the reality that many 'created equal' have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens.
We create our own realities.
We divide reality, forget that we have divided it, and then forget that we have forgotten it.
We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.
We have a positive vision of the future founded on the belief that the gap between the promise and reality of America can one day be finally closed. We believe that.
We have only to believe. And the more threatening and irreducible reality appears, the more firmly and desperately we must believe. Then, little by little, we shall see the universal horror unbend, and then smile upon us, and then take us in its more than human arms.
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship, to the reality, the hard substance of things.
We must wake up to the insane reality of our time. We are all irresponsible, unless we demand from the responsible decision makers that modern armaments must no longer be made available to people whose former battle axes and swords our ancestors condemned.
We often fancy that we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love.
We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss the point.
What an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to, to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.
What I really need is a reality-altering substance.
What is reality, anyway? It's nothing but a collective hunch.
Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be- like the reality of yesterday- an illusion tomorrow.kgbtags
Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality.
When I was younger, I lied all the time, because once you understand the power of lying, it's really like magic because you transform reality for people.
When people say there is too much violence (in my books), what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
When we do fantasy, we must not lose sight of reality.
While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.
Women need to become literary criminals, break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.
Words can shape the perception of reality for a while, but ultimately reality always wins.
Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn't very much.
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
Yes, I accept reality, but that does not imply endorsement.
You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality- not at the same time as you're bombing people, you can't.
You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.
You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.
You can only work with mirrors for so long, and eventually the reality hits.
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end- which you can never afford to lose- with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
You're immature if you can't accept reality or responsibility.
You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it.
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.
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