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Reality Quotes


"Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness."


"The ultimate security is your understanding of reality."


"There is cost for everything."



"You cannot change reality by ignoring it."


"I learned a great deal doing Brooklyn Bridge. I was able to take a giant step into the terrible reality that was then. We saw the cattle cars that took folks away. Just knowing it was real, it would be impossible not to feel."


"Reality isn't the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are."


"I wasn't at all sure I could make that sort of leap into that sort of comic book reality."


"This industry is very make-believe and you caught in a false sense of what reality is."


"Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality."


"I wanted to be a doctor at one point and I also wanted to be a pilot. I think if you grow up in a dodgy area, reality often beats down those ambitions as you get older. But with me that never really happened."


"I try to ground most of my characters in reality somehow. That's kind of what I bring to the table."


"I do not support raising the minimum wage, and the reason is as follows. When the minimum wage is raised, workers are priced out of the market. That is the economic reality that seems, at least so far, to be missing from this discussion."


"Candidates don't have to deal with reality. They talk about the wonderful things they can accomplish as if advocating them is the same as achieving them. They live in a world of political make-believe in which everything from reconciling conflicting interests to paying for costly programs is easy."


"I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a colour photograph of God Almighty - and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable.What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima."


"Alas! another instance of the triumph of hope over experience."


"Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive."


"We are shaped by each other. We adjust not to the reality of a world, but to the reality of other thinkers."


"Wishful thinking is one thing, and reality another."


"I don't know why everyoneis still trying to find out whether heaven and hell exist.Why do we need more evidence?They exist here on this very Earth.Heaven is standing atop Mount Qasiounoverlooking the Damascene sightswith the wind carrying Qabbani'sdulcet words all around you.And hell is only four hours away in Aleppo where children's cries drown out the explosions of mortar bombsuntil they lose their voice,their families, and their limbs.Yes, hell certainly does existright now, at this moment,as I pen this poem. And all we're doingto extinguish this hellfireis sighing, shrugging, liking, and sharing.Tell me: what exactly does that makeus? Are we any better than the gatekeepers of hell?"


"There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet."


"You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd."


"We tend to do period stuff because it helps make it one step removed from boring everyday reality."


"I read that Monica Seles got stabbed. And although I have nothing against Monica Seles, I'm glad somebody in sports got stabbed. I like the idea of it; it's good entertainment. If we're lucky, it'll spread through sports. And show business, too! Wouldn't you like to see a guy jump up on stage and stab some famous singer? Especially a real shitty pop singer? Maybe they'll even start stabbing comedians. Fuck it, I'm ready! I never perform without my can of mace. I have a switchblade knife, too. I'll cut your eye out and go right on telling jokes."


"One can talk good and shower down roses, but it's the receiver that has to walk through the thorns, and all its false expectations."


"It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don't damage children much. They didn't damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us."


"The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary."


"And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks."


"How do you know about the world is real?...How?...How you don't think that you are locked in matrix... which is programmed by a genius or something more further... which we don't believe it goes like fatasy and science fiction which is ...we are cursed by a witch and we stay in a box... full of illusions."


"Hungry people need food, definitely not an advice!"


"Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be."


"One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails in unbroken wholeness."


"You're here, I continued. "At least you look as if you're here. But maybe you aren't. Maybe it's just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you've hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys."


"I claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me."
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