Quotes about Reality

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

To be candid, some people have given positive thinking a bad name. I can't stand to hear some gung-ho individual say that with positive thinking you can just do 'anything.' If you think about that one for a moment, you recognize the absurdity of it.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

Revelation is something communicated from infinite agency or reality to the finite mind. But (in Farrer's picture) this is not a matter of God just interrupting the process of the world to 'insert' something alien into the gap; it happens as a result of what happens in the world of finite agents or substances, as these finite realities are modified in their relations to one another, drawn into newly meaningful shapes.

All essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge.

How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life

Stir up thy mind, and recall thy wits again from thy natural dreams, and visions, and when thou art perfectly awoken, and canst perceive that they were but dreams that troubled thee, as one newly awakened out of another kind of sleep look upon these worldly things with the same mind as thou didst upon those, that thou sawest in thy sleep.

If worldly things "be but as a dream, the thought is not far off that there may be an awakening to what is real. When he speaks of death as a necessary change, and points out that nothing useful and profitable can be brought about without change, did he perhaps think of the change in a corn of wheat, which is not quickened except it die? Nature's marvellous power of recreating out of Corruption is surely not confined to bodily things.

Soon you'll be ashes, or bones. A mere name, at most—and even that is just a sound, an echo. The things we want in life are empty, stale, and trivial. Dogs snarling at each other. Quarreling children—laughing and then bursting into tears a moment later. Trust, shame, justice, truth—"gone from the earth and only found in heaven." Why are you still here? Sensory objects are shifting and unstable; our senses dim and easily deceived

Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.

Harbour no such opinions as he holds who does thee violence, or as he would have thee hold. See things in all their naked reality.