Life Is Not About Reality Quotes & Sayings

Writing is storytelling and all of us are authors, not just of words but of reality. You are the author of your life, so go out and live! Then never quit writing about it! — Ben Mikaelsen

Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius."
The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up.
But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible
villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word — Brenda Ueland

We have relinquished and abandoned and left behind and forgotten what we believed we had to relinquish, abandon and leave behind and ultimately forget; we have let ourselves go and we have gone away and we have gone under, but we have relinquished nothing and abandoned nothing and left behind nothing and forgotten nothing; we have in reality extinguished nothing whatsoever, because our parents did not inform us of or enlighten us about the fact that our life-process is in reality nothing but a process of illness. We were up above, in the company of our parents, locked up in our walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us was nothing but lethal and we are down below, without our parents, again locked up in these walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us is nothing but lethal. — Thomas Bernhard

Do I believe a thing has limits!? Of course! Nothing exists that doesn't have limits. Existence means there's always something else, and so everything has limits. Why is it so hard to conceive that a thing is a thing, and that it isn't always being some other thing that's beyond it?"

At that moment I felt in my bones not that I was talking to a man, but to another universe. I tried one last time, from another angle, which I felt compelled to consider legitimate.

"Look, Caeiro... think about numbers... Where do they end? Take any number - say 34. Past it we have 35, 36, 37, 38 - there can be no end to it. There is no number so big that there is no number larger..."

"But that's just numbers," protested my master Caeiro.

And then, looking at me out of his formidable, childlike eyes:

"What is 34 in Reality, anyway? — Alvaro De Campos

Reality has a way of bursting the bubble of illusion, and an affair is one of the biggest illusions that anyone can experience in life. It's based almost entirely on emotions with almost no logic to support it.

That fact becomes clear when children, employers, clergy, family, and friends all hear about the affair. Because they are not in the fog, they see the affair for what it really is: the cruelest, most devastating, and selfish act anyone can ever inflict on a spouse. With so many people seeing the situation logically and not emotionally, the unfaithful spouse has an opportunity to be advised and influenced by these people. Furthermore, the betrayed spouse gains support when he or she needs it the most. — Willard F. Harley Jr.

Our perception of celebrities in Hollywood is not the reality. The reality of our lives is so much like everyone else's life. We have family members we love, everyone gets up in the morning, they have three meals a day and they go about their business. — Sissy Spacek

Literature is a source of pleasure, he said, it is one of the rare inexhaustible joys in life, but it's not only that. It must not be disassociated from reality. Everything is there. That is why I never use the word fiction. Every subtlety in life is material for a book. He insisted on the fact. Have you noticed, he'd say, that I'm talking about novels? Novels don't contain only exceptional situations, life or death choices, or major ordeals; there are also everyday difficulties, temptations, ordinary disappointments; and, in response, every human attitude, every type of behavior, from the finest to the most wretched. There are books where, as you read, you wonder: What would I have done? It's a question you have to ask yourself. Listen carefully: it is a way to learn to live. There are grown-ups who would say no, that literature is not life, that novels teach you nothing. They are wrong. Literature performs, instructs, it prepares you for life. — Laurence Cosse

I have hated you in every hour that has gone by, I hate you so that I would happily give my life for your death, and happily go to my own doom if only I could witness yours, take you with me into the depths. When I let this hate free, I am almost overcome by it, but I cannot change this and do not really know how it could be otherwise. Let no one deprecate this, nor fool himself about the power of such hatred. Hate drives to reality. Hate is the father of the action. The way out of our defiled and desecrated house is through the command to hate Satan. Only so will be earn the right to search in the darkness for the way of love.
In our hatred, we are like bees who must pay with their lives for the use of their stingers. — Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen

I think prayer may be less about asking for the things we are attached to than it is about relinquishing our attachments in some way. It can take us beyond fear, which is an attachment, and beyond hope, which is another form of attachment. It can help us remember the nature of the world and the nature of life, not on an intellectual level but in a deep and experimental way. When we pray, we don't change the world, we change ourselves. We change our consciousness. We move from an individual, isolated making-things-happen kind of consciousness to a connection on the deepest level with the largest possible reality. — Rachel Naomi Remen

What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who 'brings you down,' and you risk being very lonely, or, what is worse, cut off from reality. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Magic is a two-way process: you use it to change yourself and in return, it changes you. Letting yourself enter a magical reality is not about creating an enclave of magic beyond your everyday life, but of allowing magic in- allowing for the intrusion of the weird, the irrational, the things you can't explain, yet are undeniably real. — Phil Hine

The Gospel is not presented to mankind as an argument about religious principals. Nor is it offered as a philosophy of life. Christianity is a witness to certain facts; to events that have happened, to hopes that have been fulfilled, to realities that have been experienced, to a Person who has lived and died and been raised from the dead to reign forever. — Massey H. Shepherd

The sad reality is that there are many Christians who are "saved", "heaven bound," and "hell proofed" who do not care about the souls of the lost. What a beautiful contrast our Lord Jesus Christ is! His passion for souls brought Him from Heaven to earth, His Passion for souls motivated His compassionate activity. His passion for souls pressed Him to a rough cross where He surrendered His life to save the lost. — John Willis Zumwalt

In reality, I know I'm not hurt directly by sexism; however, my life is made less because of it, so I started thinking about the fallout from relationships in which people feed off each other. — Boots Riley

I lived through those books, songs, television shows, and movies - the way the characters talked, looked, acted. I thought that could translate over into reality, that I could make their world my world. I wanted so badly to run away from my life. But you can't bury yourself in other people's pages and scenes. You aren't David Copperfield or Tom Sawyer. Those love songs on the radio might speak to you, but they're not about you or the person you pine for. Life is not a John Hughes film. — Jason Diamond

It is of immense importance, that first and foremost, people identify themselves as human beings, rather than as a believer in a spiritual belief system. Any spiritual belief system. There is such a preoccupation with where a person will be after he/she dies, that people keep on forgetting we are all here right now - on this planet! Okay, so you are on your way to Heaven, of course, whilst many others who do not believe as you do are on their way to hell, of course - but those are not yet facts! The fact that we do have, though, is the fact that we are all here right now, on this Earth, living this life, breathing this air, and it's about time we identify ourselves with the reality in front of us: that we are human beings and we all cry, laugh, love and hurt. — C. JoyBell C.

The great thing about The Simple Life is that it's a reality show but not based on my reality, ... It has nothing to do with my life or my home or my relationships or anything. I'm not open to anything like that. — Nicole Richie

In this way, they underscored the sacred quality of life. Abstract theological ideas about God and divinity vary from culture to culture and from person to person. But common to all spiritual yearning is a desire to be bonded with the cosmos or to a reality larger than oneself. In this way, "the sacred" is not a theoretical idea, but an experience of being deeply connected with everything in the visible universe and all the forces that lie behind it. When we experience this vital sense of connectedness, life becomes engaging and meaningful. In a living cosmovision, humanity is bonded with the heavens and the living Earth - an embodiment of the starlight from which all things flow. — David Fideler

Yet in reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all those with a take on the future of the potato crisp, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.
Our era is perverse in passing off an exception as a rule. — Alain De Botton

Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice. — Karen Armstrong

When you get bullied, you automatically think that you're the reason why you're getting bullied. The reality is, it's about them, not you ... I'm all about blocking people. I'm all about saying, 'You know what, I don't need this in my life.' — Kat Graham

I find titles the hardest thing. I was worried that 'Waste Land' was too much of a downer. For me, 'The Crash Reel' confronts what the film is about: it's not just about the reality of a crash, it's about the extremity we all face, and what happens when life crashes on you. — Lucy Walker

This self-absorbed perspective treats God as a genie who simply exists to serve you in your selfish pursuit of personal fulfillment. But God is not your servant, and if you fall for the idea that life is supposed to be easy, either you will become severely disillusioned or you will live in denial of reality. Never forget that life is not about you! You exist for God's purposes, not vice versa. Why would God provide heaven on earth when he's planned the real thing for you in eternity? God gives us our time on earth to build and strengthen our character for heaven. — Rick Warren

It is in the light of our beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality that we formulate our conceptions of right and wrong that we frame our conduct, not only in the relations of private life, but also in the sphere of politics and economics. So far from being irrelevant, our metaphysical beliefs are the finally determining factor in all our actions. — Aldous Huxley

Because they are so emphatically there, and so inconvertibly interior, it is almost inevitable that we take our feelings seriously as reputable guides to the reality that is deep within us--our hearts before God. But feelings are no more spiritual than muscles. They are entirely physical. They are real, and they are important. But they are real and important in the same way that our fingernails and noses are important--we would not want to live without them (although we could if we had to), but their length and shape and colour tell us nothing about our life with God. — Eugene H. Peterson

What is illusion? By what criterion do we judge something to be an illusion? Does there exist for the psyche anything which we may call "illusion"? What we are pleased to call such may be for the psyche a most important factor of life - something as indispensable as oxygen for the organism - a psychic actuality of prime importance. Presumably the psyche does not trouble itself about our categories of reality, and it would therefore be the better part of wisdom for us to say: everything that acts is actual. — C. G. Jung

But mostly what we think of as the 'meaning' of life concerns the style of the private autobiography we each write and which records how we 'see' ourselves. Whether this autobiography reads as a narrative of progress in which difficulties are transcended, or is chaotic, is the test of whether one's life seems to be meaningful or not. Meaning is something we find, or fail to find, as we follow through this project. We can see how love figures here: love is a major theme, but how we see our experience of love depends upon our general thinking. If, for example, we work with extremely high expectations of love we impose a tragic style upon our self-perceptions: for our experience of love will always be seen under an aspect of failure - failure focused upon ourselves or others. Hence the more subtle our thinking about love, the more intelligently we discriminate ideals from reality, the more interesting our autobiography becomes. — John Armstrong

In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. Those who submit - as the majority does - are conditioned to a life lived without their human birthright: work done with the joy and creativity of love.
But what are schools for if not to make children fall so deeply in love with the world that they really want to learn about it? That is the true business of schools. And if they succeed in it, all other desirable developments follow of themselves.
In a proper school, no fact would ever be presented as a soulless one, for the simple reason that there is no such thing. Every facet of reality, discovered where it lives, startles with its wonder, beauty, meaning. — Marjorie Spock

Life is going by, and if you don't do something about your dreams and make them a reality and start to love who you are as yourself, then you will not be able to embrace any of those dreams. Who you are is the immense magic. — Ellen Greene

One of the worst things you can ever think of is not feeling excited about the future". — Abdulazeez Henry Musa

In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, ... and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one. — Alain De Botton

We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed. Even the most voluminous archives cannot help. — Milan Kundera

What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself. — Ernest Becker

Live, you say, in the present;
Live only in the present.

But I don't want the present, I want reality;
I want things that exist, not time that measures them.

What is the present?
It's something relative to the past and the future.
It's a thing that exists in virtue of other things existing.
I only want reality, things without the present.

I don't want to include time in my scheme.
I don't want to think about things as present; I want to think of them as things.
I don't want to separate them from themselves, treating them as present.

I shouldn't even treat them as real.
I should treat them as nothing.

I should see them, only see them;
See them till I can't think about them.

See them without time, without space,
To see, dispensing with everything but what you see.
And this is the science of seeing, which isn't a science. — Alberto Caeiro

The description of the New Jerusalem in chapters 21 and 22 is quite clear that some categories of people are "outside": the dogs, the fornicators, those who speak and make lies. But then, just when we have in our minds a picture of two nice, tidy categories, the insiders and the outsiders, we find that the river of the water of life flows out of the city; that growing on either bank is the tree of life, not a single tree but a great many; and that "the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations." There is a great mystery here, and all our speaking about God's eventual future must make room for it. This is not at all to cast doubt on the reality of final judgment for those who have resolutely worshipped and served the idols that dehumanize us and deface God's world. It is to say that God is always the God of surprises. But — N. T. Wright

When we talk about the theology of 'God is Dead,' this means that the notion of God must be dead in order for God to reveal himself as a reality. The theologians, if they only use concepts, and not direct experience, are not very helpful. The same goes for nirvana, which is something to be touched and lived and not discussed and described. We have notions that distort truth, reality. A Zen master said the following to a large assembly: 'My friends, every time I use the word Buddha, I suffer. I am allergic to it. Every time I do it, I have to go to the bathroom and rinse my mouth three times in succession.' He said this in order to help his disciples not to get caught up in the notion of Buddha. The Buddha is one thing, but the notion of Buddha is another. — Thich Nhat Hanh

To believe in God is to "let God be God." This is the chief business of faith. As we believe we are allowing God to be in our lives what He already is in Himself. In trusting God, we are living out our assumptions, putting into practice all that we say He is in theory so that who God is and what He has done can make the difference in every part of our lives.
This means that the accuracy of our pictures of God is not tested by our orthodoxy or our testimonies but by the truths we count on in real life. It is demonstrated when the heat is on, the chips are down, and reality seems to be breathing down our necks. What we presuppose at such moments is our real picture of God, and this may be very different from what we profess to believe about God. (God in the Dark, ch. 4) — Os Guinness

Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not some vague future or survival, in which we shall not be present. It is our own end; and everything happens in the interval between death and now. Do not talk to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me - to me who am to die outright - of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the presence of death! — Maurice Maeterlinck

The whole point of meditation is not to follow the path laid down by thought to what it considers to be truth, enlightenment or reality. There is no path to truth. The following of any path leads to what thought has already formulated and, however pleasant or satisfying, it is not truth. It is a fallacy to think that a system of meditation, the constant practising of that system in daily life for a few given moments, or the repetition of it during the day, will bring about clarity or understanding. Meditation lies beyond all this and, like love, cannot be cultivated by thought. As long as the thinker exists to meditate, meditation is merely a part of that self-isolation which is the common movement of one's everyday life. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

I do think that fashion may end up being the 'killer app' for wearable augmented reality systems. This is in part because it's not simply task-oriented - like finding a restaurant or where your friend is currently lounging about - but experience-oriented. It becomes part of your life. — Jamais Cascio

There is a difference between the fact and the truth. The fact is what you may be experiencing at any particular point in time in your life, the day-to-day reality of life, the struggles, the challenges, the issues and the problems that you face on a daily basis. On the other hand, the truth is what God's Word says about the particular situation you are going through or the challenges you currently face ... God expects you to confess and proclaim the truth of His Word, not the fact of your daily struggles! — Pedro Okoro

What then do we learn from Paul's unbroken pattern of beginning and ending his letters this way ("Grace be to you." "Grace be with you.")? We learn that grace is an unmistakable priority in the Christian life. We learn that it is from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, but that it can come through people. We learn that grace is ready to flow to us every time we take up the inspired Scriptures to read them. And we learn that grace will abide with us when we lay the Bible down and go about our daily living.
In other words, we learn that grace is not merely a past reality but a future one. Every time I reach for the Bible, God's grace is a reality that will flow to me. Every time I put the Bible down and go about my business, God's grace will go with me. This is what I mean by future grace. — John Piper

Unfortunately, the main problem of the world isn't on money, as it might seem at first sight, but on the mind of those that either use it, create it, maintain it, capitalize on it, or simply, ignore it. What use would science have if people didn't have problems needing a solution? What use would art have if people didn't have a need to escape their reality? What use would reading have if there was no desire to aspire to? What use would dreams have if life was perfect? And so, I'm not saying that money is necessary. but that our mind is what makes it valuable. And once you understand this, you actually master it. The solution lays on the fundamental laws of duality. The more you disregard money, the more it becomes a fundamental part of your world. Those that love it, however, don't even need to touch it or worry about it. And how convenient that we tend to ask questions about the things we refuse to learn about. — Robin Sacredfire

Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity's relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we've learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is- more than anything else- a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time and various living things. It's not just about human-to-human interaction; it's not just about spiritual interaction. It's about all interaction. We're bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive. We can keep debating ideologies and sending entreaties toward heaven. But unless we embrace the fuller reality we're in- and reality's implications- we'll face big problems. — Carl Safina

But I'll tell you the same thing I tell my students when they complain about the depressing nature of American literature: life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly, like our marriage did, Pat. And literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for people to endure nobly. — Matthew Quick

About the New Life Meher Baba wrote:
This New Life is endless, and even after my physical death it will be kept alive by those who live the life of complete renunciation of falsehood, lies, hatred, anger, greed and lust; and who, to accomplish all this, do no lustful actions, do no harm to anyone, do no backbiting, do not seek material possessions or power, who accept no homage, neither covet honor nor shun disgrace, and fear no one and nothing; by those who rely wholly and solely on God, and who love God purely for the sake of loving; who believe in the lovers of God and in the reality of Manifestation, and yet do not expect any spiritual or material reward; who do not let go the hand of Truth, and who, without being upset by calamities, bravely and wholeheartedly face all hardships with one hundred percent cheerfulness, and give no importance to caste, creed and religious ceremonies. This New Life will live by itself eternally, even if there is no one to live it. — Meher Baba

He should be happy because he can think about the unhappiness of others!
He's stupid if he doesn't know other people's unhappiness is theirs,
And isn't cured from the outside,
Because suffering isn't like running out of ink,
Or a trunk not having iron bands!

There being injustice is like there being death. — Alberto Caeiro

Life is a journey. It is not about where you are going or where you end up, it is about what takes you there. You can plan the path you take, but life has a way of throwing obstacles into your path that make you change course. It is not "divine intervention" or "destiny"; it is the reality of being a human being. — Courtney Lynn

Think about the reality shows we used to watch versus those today. It used to be "champagne wishes and caviar dreams" on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. It was inspirational. Now it's a diabetic chick with festering bedsores who collects her own toenails in Ziploc bags. We've gone from "Life Styles of the Rich and Famous" to "Lice Styles of the Poor and Depressed." It's all geared and produced for the viewers to think, "Well, my life is bad but not that bad. They just cut back my hours at work but I'm watching a chick who will eventually be killed by the avalanche of her own hoarded newspapers. — Adam Carolla

This dry definition, accurate as it is, does not fully suggest the importance of what it conveys. Since for us outside events do not exist unless we are aware of them, consciousness corresponds to subjectively experienced reality. While everything we feel, smell, hear, or remember is potentially a candidate for entering consciousness, the experiences that actually do become part of it are much fewer than those left out. Thus, while consciousness is a mirror that reflects what our senses tell us about what happens both outside our bodies and within the nervous system, it reflects those changes selectively, actively shaping events, imposing on them a reality of its own. The reflection consciousness provides is what we call our life: the sum of all we have heard, seen, felt, hoped, and suffered from birth to death. Although we believe that there are "things" outside consciousness, we have direct evidence only of those that find a place in it. As — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

While most of our suffering is self- inflicted, some is caused by or permitted by God. This sobering reality calls for deep submissiveness, especially when God does not remove the cup from us. In such circumstances, when reminded about the premortal shouting for joy as this life's plan was unfolded (Job 38:7), we can perhaps be pardoned if, in some moments, we wonder what all the shouting was about. — Neal A. Maxwell

Do not talk about the soul, heaven, or God. Talking about something that is not yet a reality for you amounts to falsehood. — Jaggi Vasudev

The Amorous Shepherd is a fruitless interlude, but those few poems are among the world's greatest love poems, because they're love poems about love, not about being poems. The poet loves because he loves, not because love exists. — Alvaro De Campos

That life sometimes imitates art is a mere Oscar Wilde-ish curiosity; that it should set about to do so in such unseemly haste that between notes and novel (not to mention between the drafted and the printed page) what had been fiction becomes idle fact, invention history--disconcerting! Especially to a fictionist who, like yours truly, had long since turned his professional back on literary realism in favour of the fabulous irreal, and only in this latest enterprise had projected, not without misgiving, a detente with the realistic tradition. It is as if Reality, a mistress too long ignored, must now settle scores with her errant lover. — John Barth

Until you practice surrender, the spiritual dimension is something you read about, talk about, get excited about, write books about, think about, believe in - or don't, as the case may be. It makes no difference. Not until you surrender does it become a living reality in your life. — Eckhart Tolle

Every day you choose your own reality with the thoughts in your head and the actions you take or don't take. We are all born with the same opportunity to live a full and happy life. Don't blame your circumstances. An effective mindset is one that makes the best use of available resources that are in front of you and within you. This includes your time, energy and efforts and uses them to create positive change. It's not about trying to do everything and be everything, it's making the very best of what you have while enjoying the process of living. — John Geiger

It is always now. This might sound trite, but it is the truth. It's not quite true as a matter of neurology, because our minds are built upon layers of inputs whose timing we know must be different.11 But it is true as a matter of conscious experience. The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world. But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth - overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain - and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running. — Sam Harris

My friend, when you're above the law, when you are the law. the phrase about ends justifying means has a real meaning. Put yourself in their place. If you felt that the state which you worshiped above your God was endangered by the life of one insignificant man, would you hesitate to have him shot? I can tell you that you wouldn't. That's the danger of Fascism, of state-worship. It supposes an absolute, an egocentric unit. The idea of the state is not rooted in the masses, it is not of the people. It is an abstract, a God-idea, a psychic dung-hill raised to shore up an economic system that is no longer safe. When you're on the top of that sort of dung-hill, it doesn't matter whether the ends are in reality good or bad. The fact that they are your ends makes them good
for you. — Eric Ambler

Making you believe what he wanted you to believe was his very reason for being. Maybe his only reason. I was intrigued by the way he turned events, or hints I had given him about people, into reality
that is, his kind of reality. This obsessive reinvention of the real never stopped, what-could-be having always to top what is.
...
I began to wonder which was real, the woman in the book or the one I was pretending to be upstairs. Neither of them was particularly "me." I was acting just as much upstairs; I was not myself just as much Maria in the book was not myself. Perhaps she was. I began not to know which was true and which was not, like a writer who comes to believe that he's imagined what he hasn't.
...
The book began living in me all the time, more than my everyday life. — Philip Roth

How do you separate fantasy from reality? How can you be sure the story of your life both from long ago and minute to minute is true? There is a pleasant vindication to be found when you accept that you can't. No one can, yet we persist and thrive. Who you think you are is sort of like a movie based on true events, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The details may be embellished, but the big picture, the general idea, is probably a good story worth hearing about. — David McRaney

And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multi-tude ... But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart ... I used to think that I could imagine all passions, all feelings and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know! ... Indeed, we are but shadows - we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream - till the heart be touched. That touch creates us, - then we begin to be, - thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Life is not about reality. It is about how you perceive it. — Debasish Mridha

It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety. — Neil Gaiman

Many a night that summer she left Dr. Archie's office with a desire to run and run about those quiet streets until she wore out her shoes, or wore out the streets themselves; when her chest ached and it seemed as if her heart were spreading all over the desert. When she went home, it was not to go to sleep. She used to drag her mattress beside her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window
or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation. It was on such nights that Thea Kronborg learned the thing that old Dumas meant when he told the Romanticists that to make a drama he needed but one passion and four walls. — Willa Cather

Self discovery doesn't not seek to bring you answers about your personal life or philosophically comfort you about life and death. What it does is bring you into reality as perception itself. — Frederick Lenz

The last verse [In My Secret Life] completely got to me, about how we all have great ideals but in reality we end up conforming, following everyone else. We want to be stronger so we lead that life inside, thinking of ourselves as these great brave souls. I literally thought when I was 15 that I was a musical genius and I could change the world, but in fact you're not and you can't and you don't, and that realisation is almost heartbreaking. — Katie Melua

Everything - a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being - is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. — Eckhart Tolle

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

Projection is necessary and desirable for self-fulfillment. Otherwise man is overwhelmed by his loneliness and separation and negated by the very burden of his own life. As Rank so wisely saw, projection is a necessary unburdening of the individual; man cannot live closed upon himself and for himself. he must project the meaning of his life outward, the reason for it, even the blame for it. We did not create ourselves, but we are stuck with ourselves. Technically we say that transference is a distortion of reality. But now we see that this distortion has two dimensions: distortion due to to the fear of life and death and distortion due to the heroic attempt to assure self-expansion and the intimate connection of one's inner self to surrounding nature. In other words, transference reflects the whole of the human condition and raises the largest philosophical question about that condition. — Ernest Becker

Religion is, in reality, living. Our religion is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our religion is what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we think - all these things - twenty-four hours a day. One's religion, then, is ones life, not merely the ideal life but the life as it is actually lived.
Religion is not prayer, it is not a church, it is not theistic, it is not atheistic, it has little to do with what white people call "religion." It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our religion; if we experiment on living animals, that is our religion; if we cheat at cards, that is our religion; if we dream of being famous, that is our religion; if we gossip maliciously, that is our religion; if we are rude and aggressive, that is our religion. All that we do, and are, is our religion. — Jack D. Forbes

Feminism is a way of understanding reality, not just a series of things to do. Feminism challenges our predilection for one right answer, one right God, one size fits all.
As a feminist, one can be spiritual or secular. One can lead an outwardly conservative life and yet, in feminist terms, be profoundly radical. So too, feminist leaders (like everyone else) can be sexist, or racist, or class-blind, in either their professional or personal lives. Or in both.
Feminist of my generation told the truth about women's condition. We were messengers from the past, or from the future. As ever, some people thought that killing, or at least defaming, the messengers was a way of making us and our truths disappear.
I'm counting on you not to do that. — Phyllis Chesler

That catharsis is really the core of the incredibly personal comedy of Louis C.K. or Marc Maron or whatever. And look - I find it fascinating that I'm sitting here talking about some of these things, and not to low tones, and my kids are in the other room. I have to trust that if they hear what I'm saying and they have questions about it, I'll be able to answer it, and that's fine. But that's part of the scariness of it - the reality of opening up my own life and my own feelings. — John Hodgman

For sure we live in a youth-obsessed culture that is constantly trying to tell us that if we're not young and glowing and "hot," we don't matter. But I refuse to buy into such a distorted view of reality. And I would never lie about or deny my age. To do so is to contribute to a sickness pervading our society - the sickness of wanting to be what you're not. I know for sure that only by owning who and what you are can you step into the fullness of life. I feel sorry for anyone who buys into the myth that you can be what you once were. The way to your best life isn't denial. It's owning every moment and staking a claim to the here and now. You're not the same woman you were a decade ago; if you're lucky, you're not the same woman you were last year. The whole point of aging, as I see it, is change. If we let them, our experiences can keep teaching us about ourselves. I celebrate that. Honor it. Hold it in reverence. And I'm grateful for every age I'm blessed to become. — Oprah Winfrey

Ultimately, the question was about the nature of the dunya as a place of fleeting moments and temporary attachments. As a place where people are with you today and leave or die tomorrow. But this reality hurts our very being because it goes against our nature. We, as humans, are made to seek, love, and strive for what is perfect and what is permanent. We are made to seek what's eternal. We seek this because we were not made for this life. Our first and true home was Paradise: a land that is both perfect and eternal. So the yearning for that type of life is a part of our being. The problem is that we try to find that here. And so we create ageless creams and cosmetic surgery in a desperate attempt to hold on - in an attempt to mold this world into what it is not, and will never be. — Yasmin Mogahed

Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the "irresponsibility" of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life. — James Wood

I don't believe in the Law of Attraction. There were things I wanted in my life that no amount of positive thinking was going to make it a reality for me. However, I have learned to believe in the Law of Tough Love. Life has thrown a dozen tragedies at me. I did what any Christian would do
prayed for the outcome I wanted, but God was tough and only gave me what I needed. I now realize that life is not about fulfilling a wish list; rather a need list. Good and bad experiences are on the horizon. How else does a person change, grow and evolve? And just like any warrior woman, I won't simply survive
but thrive! — Shannon L. Alder

Why do ever think about to get married??
Do we dare, all life to get worried, to be curious, to be angry, to think for money like they are gold, to think about what next to buy, to cry and even and more to happen?
Marriage is like the gold, you find it or not, it depends from you but you once lost you can't find the same gold or the same wife, it's in about of luck to find the same. Imaginate that you have gold, but you don't have money, so you go to a pawnshop and what happens the gold becomes money, but reality you have two diffirent stuff. This doesn't mean that by doing that you get the same, why don't you go and give your wife for other person??? Will be the same like your wife will live in this person for which you have replaced her??
Of course, NOT! — Deyth Banger

TV and popular film and most kinds of 'low' art
which just means art whose primary aim is to make money
is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas 'serious' art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. — David Foster Wallace

More often than not, whenever gossip has been written about me, the gossip is more interesting than the reality. I know some public figures hate gossip, but personally I like it because it makes my life sound more glamorous and interesting than it really is. — Moby

As the virtual world of electronic communication becomes the world many of us inhabit all the time, in turning to imaginative literature we may not be seeking mere reassurance nor be impelled by mere nostalgia. To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world. In one of T. S. Eliot's poems a bird sings, "Mankind cannot bear very much reality." I've always thought that bird was mistaken, or was talking only about some people. I find it amazing how much of the real world most of us can endure. Not only endure, but need, desire, crave. Reality is life. Where we suffocate is in the half-life of unreality, untruth, imitation, fakery, the almost-true that is not true. To be human is to live both within and beyond the narrow band of what-happens-now, in the vast regions of the past and the possible, the known and the imagined: our real world, our true Now. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I've been in darkness nearly all my life, and you brought light into my existance for the first time. And maybe that's why I started to ... have feeling for you. You seemed like a dream. [ ... ] But that's just infatuation. Hero worship. It's not real. I've learned a lot about love in these last months. Abd part of what I've learned is you have to want someone for who they are, not who you want them to be. You have to love a real person, not some dream in your head. Neither of us could have lived that way. — Zoe Marriott

Beyond telling and getting away however there are an awful lot of myths out there about how to move on or get justice. People may tell you to report the crime or confront you abuser- or even to forgive him. I don't necessarily advocate any of these things. I think counseling of some kind can be enormously useful, but the bottom line is that the main way to heal is to find people who will support you, to talk about what happened, and to ground yourself in the reality that the abuse was not your fault, that you have nothing to be ashamed of, and that you deserve great love and happiness in your life. — Patti Feuereisen

The reality is that the work I do is not private work. I bring all my secrets, my life, to my work. Anybody who's seen my work knows everything about me. — Andy Garcia

It may be said that myths give to the transcendent reality an immanent, this-worldly objectivity. Myths speak about gods and demons as powers on which man knows himself to be dependent, powers whose favors he needs, powers whose wrath he fears. Myths express the knowledge that man is not master of the world and his life, that the world within which he lives is full of riddles and mysteries and that human life also is full of riddles and mysteries. — Rudolf Bultmann

There are so many things we do in life that define the real meaning of our lives. There are so many ideas that come to us each moment of time. There are so many things we conceive each day which give birth to things that define who we are and how we are living life. Everybody knows something and everybody thinks about something! A true value of our lives is not just in what we conceive each moment of time, but also in how we nurture and give life to what we conceive, against all odds, to give birth to something that defines who we are and who we become in the end! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

How do text messages make you feel existential?
I start thinking about exactly that: how people can edit a thought before sending it out to the world. They can make themselves seem more well spoken than they are, or funnier, smarter. I start thinking that no one in the world is who they say the are, then my mind goes to how I also edit myself, not just online but in real life, except for those rare instances like right now where I'm ranting- even though that's a lie because I've had this train of thought before and damned if I didn't tweak it in my head a few times to make it sound better- and then my mind starts racing so furiously I can't control my thoughts, and I start thinking about robots and wondering if I'm even a real person. — Adi Alsaid

All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life so alienated from common human reality that I am convinced it is wrong and that most people would agree with me if they could perceive an alternative. We might be able to see that if we regained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found - in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends, and real communities are built - then we would be so self-sufficient we would not even need the material "sufficiency" which our global "experts" are so insistent we be concerned about. — John Taylor Gatto

But caveat lector: life is waiting, and to read about someone who writes about life is getting far from it. Reading Schopenhauer when he tells you to watch out for reading too many books is already getting far from it, and at this moment you are reading someone who is telling you about how Schopenhauer said that you should not let reading come between you and life. In philosophy, the infinite regress is a sign that someone has made a mistake in logic. In ordinary life, it is a sign that someone is hiding from reality. — Clive James

Stress is not about carrying the burden yourself but, failure to set your priorities straight". — Abdulazeez Henry Musa

The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous. The language of society is conformity; the language of the creative individual is freedom. Life will continue to be a hell as long as people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality. — Henry Miller

Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. 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. — Walt Disney Company

As young girls we grow up with the idea that life is going to be a bit of a fairytale. But at some point reality hits and we realise that's not what life is about. Many of us are faced with eating disorders and mental health struggles, bad relationships and heartbreak, low self-esteem and confused sexualities and more. Life is very much real. — Darren Fletcher

Life is not all about what you hope to get but what you hope to give". — Abdulazeez Henry Musa

I want to talk about faith. It's not about whether something is true, or-or-or based in fact or reality or the laws of physics or nature or even basic common sense. It's about whether or not we're dumb enough to believe in it that matters. Oh, folks, who the hell am I to say that there is no God? Who am I? Or to say that anybody's belief in the church doesn't make their life better? Maybe it does. Or that this man, Dr. Jinx - who am I to say that he can't cure diseases with his sorcery? I don't know. I say maybe he can. And I believe that maybe he can.

Ladies and gentlemen, if we believe... if we just believe... then we can do anything!

Oh, yeah, ladies and gentlemen. I feel it now! Do you feel it? Do you feel the spirit? Do you feel the invisible things around you that don't really exist? Oh, it doesn't matter! — Dennis Reynolds

The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity," said a tall, soft-eyed girl. "Love is the true condition of human life."
Bedap shook his head. "No. Shev's right," he said. "Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn't enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that's not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end. — Philip Pullman

The first stage of the economy's domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having - human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing - all "having" must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only if it is not actually real. — Guy Debord

It's not my business to worry about the reason. God knows the reason. One day I may discover what it was. Or not. It doesn't matter. All I know now is that I can't stake a bit of my life on it being true, the story. If it's true it requires the staking of the whole of my life. And that's because it's not only a story, as you and I have always called it. It's something that happened in reality, to reality, and changed it forever. It's something that asked a question that, once we've heard it, we have to answer. — Lucy Beckett

You always do this to people?"
"Do what?"
"Get them to empty their guts out just like that."
"We do not have much time. We should only talk about what is important. — Francisco X Stork

Little is known about the love lives of the undead. Really, past the brain-eating, reanimated corpse angle, not much is said for the zombie's perspective. So they ate brains - big deal! Sure, they were corpses - so what? Indeed, there was the smell, but whose fault was that?
At first glance they were brain-hungry cannibals, (Mmm, brains. Maybe with a little cilantro or a garlic rub - mashed potatoes and brainsloaf - brains pot pie - penne a la brains...) but in reality, zombies were not the mindless man-eaters or virus-addled lunatics jonesing for human flesh depicted in the movies. Just like everything in life - or rather, unlife - things were more complicated. Zombies were, until very recently, people. And with that came wants, desires, longings. Needs.
Asher had been troubled by the zombie loneliness until Brenda, the attractive corpse he'd met in a less animated state earlier, pulled him into the cemetery, threw him down on a slab and shagged him silly. — Daniel Younger