Image And Reality Quotes & Sayings

A harmonious combination ... enough abstraction that the image is sustained by the eye; enough reality that it is sustained by reason and experience. Share this quote with a friend — Jean Helion

Alan Rocke's Image and Reality does so many things vividly and convincingly: it shows how visual images led chemistry step by step to the reality of the microscopic world; how simple portrayals of the logic of substitution and combination were reified; brings to our attention the imaginative, neglected work of Williamson and Kopp; and takes a critical look at Kekule's daydream. And it beautifully delineates the essential place the imagination has in science. A rewarding, lively picture of chemistry in formation. — Roald Hoffmann

[I]t is no doubt true that our image of what a messiah might look like may keep us from recognizing the real thing when it stands before us. Could it be that we have embellished the long-awaited event with so many aggadic flourishes that we can no longer recognize the reality when it happens? Could our overly literal reading of our sages' poetic descriptions have led us to overlook completely the miracle as it happened?
One of the dangers of taking the statements and speculations of our sages as literal truth - when they were not meant as such - is the distortion of our expectations. — Nathan Lopes Cardozo

In so far as the church nurtures the schizophrenic Christian, the church herself contributes to the very process of dismemberment which it is her specific business to check and counter. For the church's function is properly to reconstitute the concept and the reality of the fill man, faculties, and forces blended and united in the service of God. The church's mission as the continuing vehicle of divine incarnation is precisely that- to build and rebuild the unified Body made and remade in the image of the Father. The mind of man must be won for God. — Harry Blamires

When faced with unbridled wildness of reality, dinosaurs fall into fevered delusions of grandeur. In fits of madness, they recreate the world in their own overblown image, bull-dozing the wild and replacing it with a wasteland that reflects their own emptiness. Where there was once the incredibly complex diversity of nature, there is now the dead simplicity of asphalt and concrete. — Curious George Brigade

Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain't-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on
our lost narcissism lives on
in our ego ideal. — Judith Viorst

Young people, women especially, often worry about the safety of volunteering abroad. There are, of course, legitimate concerns about disease and violence, but mostly there is the exaggerated fear of the unknown - the mirror image of the nervousness that Africans or Indians feel when they travel to America for their studies. In reality, Americans and Europeans are usually treated hospitably in the developing world, and are much less likely to be robbed in an African village than in Paris or Rome. — Anonymous

PAYING ATTENTION TO GOD We bless GOD, oh yes - we bless him now, we bless him always! PSALM 115:18, THE MESSAGE Prayer is the most thoroughly present act we have as humans, and the most energetic: it sockets the immediate past into the immediate future and makes a flexible, living joint of them. The Amen gathers what has just happened into the Maranatha of the about to happen and produces a Benediction. We pay attention to God and lead others to pay attention to God. It hardly matters that so many people would rather pay attention to their standards of living, or their self-image, or their zeal to make a mark in the world. The reality is God: worship or flee. THE CONTEMPLATIVE PASTOR — Eugene H. Peterson

If there's a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn't exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn't have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that's it. That's all an artist does. — Tom Robbins

I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind that become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters. — Robert Penn Warren

I know that everyone who listens to radio creates you in a visual image that they need you to have. Whatever that is, I thought, let them have it. Let me be who the listener needs me to be and let me not contradict that with the reality of my photograph and risk disappointing them. — Terry Gross

The constancies and equivalences adumbrated work havoc with such settled topical blocks as myth and philosophy, natural reason and revelation, philosophy and religion, or the Orient with its cyclical time and Christianity with its linear history. And what is modem about the modem mind, one may ask, if Hegel, Comte, or Marx, in order to create an image of history that will support their ideological imperialism, still use the same techniques for distorting the reality of history as their Sumerian predecessors? — Eric Voegelin

[Speaking of marriage and family] In this entire world there is not a more perfect, more complete image of God, Unity and Community. There is no other human reality which corresponds more, humanly speaking, to that divine mystery. — Pope John Paul II

She's shaped her image of the world around someone else's fantasy ... Because it's easier. It's so much easier to say, 'This is a story, and there are heroes and villains, and there's an ending, and when we get there the book will close and we'll all live happily ever after. — Mira Grant

America washes its dirty linen in public. When scandals such as this one hit, they do sully America's image in the world. But what usually also gets broadcast around the world is the vivid reality that the United States forces accountability and punishes wrongdoing, even at the highest levels. — Fareed Zakaria

Think and then think what you have thought. Is it really what you had thought. Think again. — Amit Abraham

That's sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something ... real." Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. "Real love, real friends, real body parts ... — Jess C. Scott

The Ego, as noted, is simply the content of your PSM [Phenomenal Self Model] at this moment (your bodily sensations, your emotional state, your perceptions, memories, acts of will, thoughts). But it can become the Ego only because you are constitutionally unable to realize that all this is just the content of a simulation in your brain. It is not reality itself but an image of reality - and a very special one indeed. The Ego is a transparent mental image: You - the physical person as a whole - look right through it. You do not see it. You see with it. The Ego is a tool for controlling and planning your behavior and for understanding the behavior of others — Thomas Metzinger

I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.
-Claude Frollo — Victor Hugo

When a man invents an image that he wants to propagate, that he may even want to substitute for himself, he starts by experimenting, making mistakes, sketching out freaks and other non-viable monsters that he has to tear up unless they disintegrate of their own accord. But the operative image is the one that's left after the person dies or withdraws from the world, as in the case of Socrates, Christ, Saladin, Saint-Just and so on. They succeeded in projecting an image around themselves and into the future. It doesn't matter whether or not the image corresponds to what they were really like: they managed to wrest a powerful image from that reality. — Jean Genet

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them. — Anais Nin

Images in the 20th century had a unique power where image became divorced from reality, and often more important than reality ... Buildings were judged - at least by members of our own profession - more by the way they looked in magazines than by the satisfaction people felt when using them. — Christopher Alexander

Should Hillary Clinton run for president, voters who ignore the difference between the image she seeks to project and the reality will have only themselves to blame if her presidency turns into a disaster. — Ronald Kessler

Let but a single flash of reality
the glimpse of a woman from afar or from behind
enable us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes, and we imagine that we have recognised it, our hearts beat, and we will always remain half-persuaded that it was She, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake. — Marcel Proust

Like my maestro, Juan Ribero, she believed that photography and painting are not competing arts but basically different: the painter interpets reality, and the camera captures it. In the former everything is fiction, while the second is the sum of the real plus the sensibility of the photographer. Ribero never allowed me sentimental or exhibitionist tricks-none of this arranging objects or models to look like paintings. He was the enemy of artificial compostion; he did not let me manipulate negatives or prints, and in general he scorned effects of spots or diffuse lighting: he wanted the honest and simple image, although clear in the most minute details. — Isabel Allende

To the vast majority of people a photograph is an image of something within their direct experience: a more-or-less factual reality. It is difficult for them to realize that the photograph can be the source of experience, as well as the reflection of spiritual awareness of the world and of self. — Ansel Adams

We are fond of saying that the Bible has all the answers. And that is certainly correct. The text of the Bible sets us in a reality that is congruent with who we are as created beings in God's image and what we are destined for in the purposes of Christ. But the Bible also has all the questions, many of them that we would just as soon were never asked of us, and some of which we will spend the rest of our lives doing our best to dodge. The Bible is a most comforting book; it is also a most discomfiting book. — Eugene H. Peterson

You have no shot at experiencing real change in life if you're habitually protecting your image, hyping your spiritual brand, and putting out the vibe that you're a lot more unfazed by temptation than the reality you know and live would suggest. — Matt Chandler

We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see. — Michelangelo Antonioni

The Secoya are trapped between the devastating effects of the colonization frontier and their rich traditional past, which is proving to be as fragile a reality and as fleeting a memory as the most powerful visions of their esoteric science. But instead of detailing that sad scene, in this chapter I have attempted to portray my image of this culture as I see it in its fading colors, magic, and awe-inspiring mystery. — Jonathon Miller Weisberger

I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me: my love for the place, for the one man left, for my children and friends and the great green pulse of spring. — Sally Mann

The sexual map we acquire in youth includes body image, masturbatory guilt, sexual preferences and more. From what turns us on to what turns us off. From attitudes about menstruation to the right of women to wear certain clothing. But using this guilt- and shame-ridden map as a guide to sexuality is like using a map of an ancient city sewer system to locate the fiber optic network. What if the only map we had of a city was made 2,000 years ago? How useful would it be today? My city was an open prairie 2,000 years ago with no roads and maybe a few animal paths. A map of that reality would be of little use today. — Darrel Ray

I think the body image thing, everybody can identify with that. In our culture there's just so much pressure and so much attention placed on the way we look. You just turn on the TV or flip open a magazine and there's people who don't look like any of us. I think this movie is like, finally, a celebration of reality and of our imperfections. We're not all a size 2 and we're not all a size 0, and you know what? That's OK, because some of us like to eat! — America Ferrera

If our mental processes become focused on our internal dogmas and isolated from the unfolding, constantly dynamic outside world, we experience mismatches between our mental images and reality. Then confusion and disorder and uncertainty not only result but continue to increase. Ultimately, as disorder increases, chaos can result. Boyd showed why this is a natural process and why the only alternative is to do a destructive deduction and rebuild one's mental image to correspond to the new reality. — Robert Coram

You determine your assumptions in this way: Form a mental image, a picture of the state desired, of the person you want to be. Concentrate your attention upon the feeling that you are already that person. First, visualize the picture in your consciousness. Then feel yourself to be in that state as though it actually formed your surrounding world. By your imagination that which was a mere mental image is changed into a seemingly solid reality. The great secret is a controlled imagination and a well-sustained attention firmly and repeatedly focused on the object to be accomplished. It cannot be emphasized too much that, by creating an ideal within your mental sphere, by assuming that you are already that ideal, you identify yourself with it and — Neville Goddard

Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. — Plato

I understood that the attachment to myself and my image ... was actually taking me away from my self, away from this wonderful opportunity to just sit, just breathe, just feel the warm animal of my body, just feel the soft, sultry heat of June. The density of my attachment was making it impossible for me to have a truly satisfying experience of life in my body just as it was in the moment. When under the sway of this obsession, my mind's attention was always in the fantasized future, or the idealized or devalued past - never present to the reality of the moment. — Stephen Cope

Objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to myself. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one. — Federico Fellini

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. — Naomi Klein

But then I looked in the glass and saw the spy beyond the clergyman, the image beyond the image, and beyond the spy was yet another man, the image beyond the image beyond the image. Reality blurred; fantasy and truth became inextricably intertwined. I told myself I had imagined the distant stranger but as I felt my personality begin to divide I covered my face with my hands. — Susan Howatch

All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead. — C.S. Lewis

Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image
its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism
has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last the equal of the novelist — Andre Bazin

When someone tells you it's a grain of sand, there's a moment where your reality falls apart and you have to reconstruct it. You have to step back and ask what the image is and what it means. — Vik Muniz

As an epiphany of God, Jesus discloses that at the center of everything is a reality that is in love with us and wills our well-being, both as individuals and as individuals within society. As an image of God, Jesus challenges the most widespread image of reality in both the ancient and modern world, countering conventional wisdom's understanding of God as one with demands that must be met by the anxious self in search of its own security. In its place is an image of God as the compassionate one who invites people into a relationship which is the source of transformation of human life in both its individual and social aspects. — Marcus J. Borg

So: if you buy the notion that reality consists of the things in your freeze-frame mental image right now, and if you agree that your now is no more valid than the now of someone located far away in space who can move freely, then reality encompasses all of the events in spacetime. — Brian Greene

Iris is my opposite in all ways small. She loves reality TV, finds movies too long, and only reads when it's for an assignment. Her idea of fun involves a credit card and an open mall, and she has harbored a massive crush on Justin Bieber, despite all his WTFuckery, since her junior year of high school. Her continuing love of The Bieb is evident by the fact that her favorite nightshirt is a My World concert tee. And while the image of his face plastered over her boobs is more than creepy, I hate that she hides the shirt whenever Henry comes around. Or rather, I hate that Henry makes her feel like she should to hide it for fear he'll make fun of her. — Kristen Callihan

Even Proust - there's a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she's sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so - the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting's blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream that image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because - the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times. — Donna Tartt

The new focus on the image undermined traditional definitions of information, of news, and, to a large extent, of reality itself. — Neil Postman

The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents. It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honor. — Thomas Lynch

The suppression of ecstasy and condemnation of pleasure by patriarchal religion have left us in a deep, festering morass. The pleasures people seek in modern times are superficial, venal, and corrupt. This is deeply unfortunate, for it justifies the patriarchal condemnation of pleasure that rotted out our hedonistic capacities in the first place! Narcissism is rampant, having reached a truly global scale. It now appears to have entered the terminal phase known as "cocooning," the ultimate state of isolation. Dissociation from the natural world verges on complete disembodiment, represented in Archontic ploys such as "transhumanism," cloning, virtual reality, and the uploading of human consciousness into cyberspace. The computer looks due to replace the cross as the primary image of salvation. It is already the altar where millions worship daily. If the technocrats prevail, artificial intelligence and artificial life will soon overrule the natural order of the planet. — John Lamb Lash

Les Miserables is first of all the product of a varied experience of the world, containing the perceptions of an entire life. And this image of reality is also a realistic image. The symbol, as Hugo uses it, does not idealize things; rather, it expresses their spiritual meaning without disguising them. — Victor Hugo

I realized early on that artifice attracted me to an image more than any other quality - I mean artifice in the sense of staging and heightened color and exaggerated lighting, not a surreal or fictive moment ... I think the lighting and feeling of Cinemascope, the movies I saw as a kid, always stayed with me as a kind of glorious vision of reality. — Laurie Simmons

And so art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image. Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. It no longer even surpasses fiction: it captures every dream even before it takes on the appearance of a dream. — Jean Baudrillard

Nothing resembles reality less than the photograph. Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the limitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the subject; and that is something else again. — Thomas Merton

A false image is, of course, a work of art, an idol. And a lie. A narcissist identifies with this image, not his true inner self. So, all he cares about is his image, not what kind of person he really is. Indeed, the latter has no real existence in his world.

In identifying with his image, he's identifying with an ephemeral figment that has but virtual reality, a purely immanent existence as a reflection in the attention shone on him by others. No attention, no image. No image, no self! — Kathy Krajco

In reality, mankind is still metaphysically in God's likeness, but
God's image in mankind has been altered by sin. We can no longer
duplicate or reflect God's attitudes as we once could do. That is, we can
no longer be holy as God is holy. Our morality has been altered and no
longer has the capability to duplicate or reflect God's image. So what is
the answer? Can this image be repaired or made whole again? The answer
is, YES! — Reid A. Ashbaucher

Reality is blocked by form and image. — Rumi

But there are realities governing what they can do. And Ukraine cannot live with the false image that somehow or another the West will come and rescue her. It's not going to happen. — Marvin Kalb

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality. — Ruth Bernhard

A person whom is unhappy with life realizes that their construction of a self-image is incompatible with their earthly reality. An unhappy person must alter their internal or external world; otherwise, their sadness, sorrow, grief, and misery will remain unabated. Misery and desperation can lead to change, but only if a person is willing to learn, explore, and try. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There's always, always a difference between the family image and the reality. — Rachel Cusk

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. — Susan Sontag

Are we not witnessing a situation where children are conciously rejecting their parents' value despite love and devotion given to them? The present situation has arisen because parents have failed to transmit a sustaining faith to their children. The basic reason for this failure is that the parents themselves lacked faith. Without faith, their love was an image not a reality, a statement of words not an expression of feelings — Alexander Lowen

And so of course we won't define 'biblical womanhood' well using a list of chores or a job description, a schedule or income level. After all, healthy God-glorifying homes look as different as the image bearers that entered into the covenant, biblical doesn't mean a baptized version of any culture, ancient or modern.
No, I am a biblical woman because I live and move and have my being in the daily reality of being a follower of Jesus, living in the reality of being loved, in full trust of my Abba. I am a biblical woman because I follow in the footsteps of all the biblical women who cam before me.
Biblical womanhood isn't so different from biblical personhood. Biblical personhood becomes a dead list of rules when it becomes a law to keep. If we have a long list of rules - Put others first! Be generous! Give money! Believe this! Do that! - it's a dead religion from a glorified rule book. — Sarah Bessey

I find three basic characteristics that fundamentally distinguish the novel in principle from other genres: (i) its stylistic three-dimensionality, which is linked with the multi-languaged consciousness realized in the novel; (2) the radical change it effects in the temporal coordinates of the literary image; (3) the new zone opened by the novel for structuring literary images, namely, the zone of maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness.
These three characteristics of the novel are all organically interrelated and have all been powerfully affected by a very specific rupture in the history of European civilization: its emergence from a socially isolated and culturally deaf semipatriarchal society, and its entrance into international and interlingual contacts and relationships. — Mikhail Bakhtin

Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such the autonomous movement of non-life. — Guy Debord

To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

When the brain is released from the constraints of reality, it can generate any sound, image, or smell in its repertoire, sometimes in complex and "impossible" combinations". — Oliver Sacks

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either. — Antoni Tapies

She had the face of an angel, and the hair of the Devil's handmaiden. The freshly washed locks flowed around her in a waist-length curtain, waves and curls of molten red that contained every shade from cinnamon to strawberry-gold. It was the kind of hair that nature usually bestowed on homely women to atone for their lack of physical beauty.
But Vivien had a face and form that belonged in a Renaissance painting, except that the reality of her was more delicate and fresh than any painted image could convey. Now that her eyes were no longer swollen, the pure blue intensity of her gaze shone full and direct on him. Her mouth, tender and rose-tinted, was a marvel of nature. — Lisa Kleypas

In wrestling, nothing exists unless it exists totally, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is given exhaustively; leaving nothing in shadow, the gesture severs every parasitical meaning and ceremonially presents the public with a pure and full signification, three dimensional, like Nature. Such emphasis is nothing but the popular and ancestral image of the perfect intelligibility of reality. What is enacted by wrestling, then, is an ideal intelligence of things, a euphoria of humanity, raised for a while out of the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and installed in a panoramic vision of a univocal Nature, in which signs finally correspond to causes without obstacle, without evasion, and without contradiction. — Roland Barthes

People had their image of what a cowboy was, ... A lot of it was perpetuated by the media presentations of the cowboys in fiction and old Westerns. And because of the tenure of the times, African-Americans were left out. As a result, reality was distorted. — Philip Roberts

And, as in the case of sensible images, if the artist look without distraction upon the archetypal form, not distracted by sight of anything else, or in any way divided in attention, he will duplicate, if I may so speak, the very person that is being sketched, whoever he may be, and will shew the reality in the likeness, and the archetype in the image, and each in each, save the difference of substance; — Pseudo-Dionysius The Areopagite

He wants her in his bedroom. And not in that way - no girl has ever been in his bedroom that way. It is his private space, his sanctuary. But he wants Clary there. He wants her to see him, the reality of him, not the image he shows the world. He wants to lie down on the bed with her and have her curl into him. He wants to hold her as she breathes softly through the night; to see her as no one else sees her: vulnerable and asleep. To see her and to be seen. — Cassandra Clare

Whereas representation attempts
to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever;
it is its own pure simulacrum. — Jean Baudrillard

Jesus is much more concerned about shaking your foundations, giving you an utterly alternative self image, world image, and God image, and thus reframing your entire reality. Mere inspiration can never do this. — Richard Rohr

If you have realistic ideals and can generally live up to them, your self-esteem will not be threatened. If your ideals are exaggerated and you cannot reach them, your good feelings from successes may be short lived, and you may feel that you are never good enough.
The continued hope for the impossible, the expectation that you will or can be unconditionally loved and adored, is not facing reality but rather holding onto an idealized image of yourself and an idealized version of what others can provide. If this is the case, your sense of self may be threatened by shame and its resulting depression, or by feelings of inadequacy for not living up to your unrealistic ideals. A better understanding of shame may help you recognize your tendency to hide what you feel from yourself and others. — Mary C. Lamia

My job is not to worry about what everyone else thinks about me but to discover what I think. If I actually want to know what someone else thinks, my job is then to ask that person. More often than not, however, it isn't important to know. It's okay if people are mad at me, and it's okay if people think I'm a complete idiot - as long as I'm doing my best. Just because certain people might have judgments about me, it does not mean they have authority over me. To truly form my own life, I had to ask questions like 'What are my needs? And 'What are my thoughts?' I had to acknowledge both my strengths and my weaknesses. I had to form my own opinions based on my reality instead of someone else's. — Jenni Schaefer

Heard as a moralist's diatribe, the Sermon on the Mount is an impossible-to-bear judgment. Read as a series of mandates for Jesus' disciples, it is an impossible-to-attain standard. Heard as heaven's dream for the creatures made in God's own image, however, the sermon becomes an impossible-to-wait-for world of Eden restored. Read as the Heavenly Father's reality in which we participate as his children by being transformed into the likeness of the one Perfect Son, it is our new-creation identity dawning on us and forming in our daily life habits. This is a righteousness that both fulfills the Law and the Prophets and exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. — Rubel Shelly

Just as it is known
That an image of one's face is seen
Depending on a mirror
But does not really exist as a face,
So the conception of "I" exists
Dependent on mind and body,
But like the image of a face
The "I" does not at all exist as its own reality. — Nagarjuna

What is a self-image? Who started talking about one? I rather fancy it was Madison Avenue. Picture Satan in a business suit, with well-groomed horns and a superbly switching tail, sitting at his huge executive's desk, thinking, 'Aha! If I can substitute images for reality I can get a lot more people under my domination. — Madeleine L'Engle

The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly irridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves. — Daniel J. Boorstin

I clicked the gate shut and slipped down the alley. Through one fence after another, I caught glimpses of people in their dining rooms and living rooms, eating and watching TV dramas. Food smells drifted into the alley through kitchen windows and exhaust fans. One teenaged boy was practicing a fast passage on his electric guitar, with the volume turned down. In a second floor window, a tiny girl was studying at her desk, an earnest expression on her face. A married couple in a heated argument sent their voices out to the alley. A baby was screaming. A telephone rang. Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl - as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response. — Haruki Murakami

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. — Robert Collier

Reality manifests itself as constant and objective - independent of us, but as changeable in space and time. Consequently, its reflection in us contains both properties. Mixed up in our mind, these properties are confused and we do not have a proper image of reality. — Piet Mondrian

Even time is a concept. In reality we are always in the eternal present. The past is just a memory, the future just an image or thought. All our stories about past and future are only ideas, arising in the moment. Our modern culture is so tyrannized by goals, plans, and improvement schemes that we constantly live for the future. But as Aldous Huxley reminded us in his writings, An idolatrous religion is one in which time is substituted for eternity ... the idea of endless progress is the devil's work, even today demanding human sacrifice on an enormous scale. — Jack Kornfield

The more distant and distinct the relationship between two realities that are brought together, the more powerful the image. — Pierre Reverdy

I hoped to burn out, through Hella, my image of Giovanni and the reality of his touch - I hoped to drive out fire with fire. — James Baldwin

We measure our success of love in the images of love. But those images are static. And it's a hopeless project, because our love will never be like that image. The actual reality of love in our lives is much more chaotic. — Pernille Fischer Christensen

A woman should be able to see the reflection of herself within her lover's eyes. This tells you that you are all that your lover sees. However, by simply placing that thought into your mind, and creating that image, your illusion will blind you from what your lover truly sees. This is usually a woman's reality, until they start to demand the truth. — Lionel Suggs

When the image is identical to reality, the imagination is compelled to be neutral. Therefore let the image of the object lie to the object so we can see what lies beyond the object, and in the light of that vision see what saves us from nothingness. — Mahmoud Darwish

He thought about how the camera makes one fall in love with an image of oneself, and perpetuates a false reality. — Ben Okri

Sure one could argue the naturalist's case that the mind experiences an external reality in which it participates. But how can this account really satisfy us, Olga? One could equally well argue that all experiences is highly subjective, that the only thing we really have is the image, the smell, the taste, and all of our assertions about the universe are constructions of the human mind. — Janna Levin

The image isn't reality. Even though we're used to thinking that way alot of the time. We show a kid a picture of a dog and say 'This is a doggie' - but it's not. It's just an image. — L.J.Smith

Our idea of nature is increasingly being determined by scientific developments. And they have become decisive for our image of reality. — Thom Mayne

In reality, everything is within; the outer is just a projection. Fear is within you; it is projected as a hell. Hell is just a projected image on the screen - of the fear that is within you, of the anger, of the jealousy, of all that is poisonous in you, of all that is evil in you. Heaven is, again, a projected image on the screen - of all that is good and beautiful, of all that is blissful within you. — Rajneesh

In pursuit of his ends, Jefferson sought, acquired, and wielded power, which is the bending of the world to one's will, the remaking of reality in one's own image.33 Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators: They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma. Jefferson had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move men, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic. To realize his vision, he compromised and improvised. The willingness to do what he needed to do in a given moment makes him an elusive historical figure. — Jon Meacham

Critical thinking helps us to more clearly understand situations, patients, colleagues, and our agendas, negative emotions, attitudes, motivations, talents, and growing edges. This not only helps us to have a greater grasp of reality but also stops the drain of psychological energy that is necessary to be defensive or to protect our image. Because critical thinking is not natural, although we may think it is for us, it takes discipline, a willingness to face the unpleasant, and a stamina that allows one not to become unduly frustrated when we do not achieve results as quickly as we prefer with respect to our insights and growth. — Robert J. Wicks

Not exactly. I see a girl who wants to present someone special to the world. Someone beautiful. The pinnacle of beauty. But she has lost her hold on reality. Real beauty isn't thin. It isn't size two, unless you happen to be four foot ten. What the world sees when they look at you is someone who believes self-worth is all about how she looks, and that very often means that what she's missing is love. Not someone else's love. But love and respect for herself. — Ellen Hopkins

What a concentration of images in Pasternak's swallow's nest! And, in reality, why should we stop building and molding the world's clay about our own shelters? Mankind's nest, like his world, is never finished. And imagination helps us to continue it. A poet cannot leave such a great image as this, nor, to be more exact, can such an image leave its poet. Boris Pasternak also wrote Man himself is mute, and it is the image that speaks. For it is obvious that the image alone can keep pace with nature. — Gaston Bachelard