Quotes about Reality

Without the proper engagement in truth, your life will degenerate and you will end up embittered and in hell.

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

Life-the way it really is-is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

The inner world is as real as the outer world. One ought to be conscious of that… These two worlds are fed by each other, you must not neglect one at the expense of the other, must not deem one more important than the other.

But sooner or later we find that not everything is to our liking in this book. It starts out sweet to our taste; and then we find it doesn't sit well with us at all, it becomes bitter in our stomachs. Finding ourselves in this book is most pleasant, flattering even, and then we find that the book is not written to flatter us, but to involve us in a reality, God's reality, that doesn't cater to our fantasies of ourselves.

Each act of obedience by the Christian is a modest proof, unequivocal for all its imperfection, of the reality of what he attests.

This is the crisis we're in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God. Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won't come near it, fearing a painful exposure. But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is.

Real life, the real world, is a vast theater of salvation, directed by our wise and totally involved God.

Any time that we move from personal names to abstract labels or graphs or statistics, we are less in touch with reality and diminished in our capacity to deal with what is best and at the center of life. Yet we are encouraged on every side to do just that.

But having gotten what we had always wanted, we find we have not gotten what we wanted at all. We are less fulfilled than ever.

To experience presence is to enter that far larger world of reality that our sensory experiences point to but cannot describe—the realities of love and compassion, justice and faithfulness, sin and evil . . . and God. Mostly God. The realities that are Word-evoked are where most of the world's action takes place. There are no "mere words.

We don't become praising people by avoiding or skipping or denying the pain and the poverty and the doubt and the guilt but by entering into them, exploring them, minding their significance, embracing the reality of these experiences. That is what is so distressing about the religious entertainment industry in our land.