Quotes & Sayings About Real World

When I am writing political op-eds, I do think carefully about the impact of my words. When I am writing fiction, it's a different story. In my fiction I am more reckless. I don't care about the real world until I am done with the book. — Elif Safak

My real desire is to see people live in the modus of our time, to participate in the contemporary world, to release themselves from nostalgia, antiquated traditions, old rituals, meaningless kitsch, and that we be conscious and sensorially attuned to this world in this moment that we are alive. — Karim Rashid

Philosophy has been described as thinking about thinking, and all Christians should do that. The term comes from two Greek words, philia ("love") and sophia ("wisdom"), thus "loving wisdom." Nothing anti-Christian appears in that definition. Problems arise if we seek wisdom apart from God, or elevate human reason above Him, but according to Proverbs 4:5-7, God's people should love and seek wisdom.
Formal philosophy is divided into three major areas-incidentally, all core Christian issues: (1) Metaphysics,
which asks questions about the nature of reality: "What is real?" "Is the basic essence of the world matter, or spirit, or something else?" (2) Epistemology, which addresses issues concerning truth and knowledge: "What do we know?" "How do we know it?" "Why do we think it's true?" (3) Ethics, which considers moral problems: "What is right and wrong?" "Are moral values absolute or relative?" "What is the good life, and how do we achieve it? — Rick Cornish

We live in a world in which it is impossible to anticipate most of the contingencies that will arise. Neither the political context, nor the inventions, nor the fashions, nor the weather, nor the climate are precisely specifiable in advance. There is, in the real world, no possibility of working with an abstract space of all the contingencies that may evolve. To do real economics, without mythological elements, we need a theoretical framework in which time is real and the future is not specifiable in advance, even in principle. It is only in such a theoretical context that the full scope of our power to construct our future can make sense. — Lee Smolin

Victory was for those willing to fight and die. Intellectuals could theorize until they sucked their thumbs right off their hands, but in the real world, power still flowed from the barrel of a gun. — Mark Bowden

Question: Is the world as it's depicted in words the real world? Words stand between the person and his soul. And — Svetlana Alexievich

It was a new idea, my first real leaf. Just like every other audacious seedling in the world, I would make it up as I went along. — Hope Jahren

Remember those black-and-white films with Frank Sinatra? Those guys looked like men and they were only 27! Listen to Otis Redding singing 'Try A Little Tenderness'. That was a man who understood what a man has to know in the world. Show me a real man now! Where are they? — Chrissie Hynde

Having Simultanagnosia (object blindness), Prosopagnosia (face blindness) and Semantic Agnosia (meaning blindness) goes in my favour with regards to abstract art living in world full of fragmented pieces when I draw it is in real time no visual memory means no "pre-formatted" picture in my mind so I go where my hand takes it's like journey that is happening in the moment, hence why I drew these without my lenses on. When I was younger I would draw pictures by "route" which made it a appear that I had a visual memory (cobbling together things out of context and making a contextual image) — Paul Isaacs

People who choose to earn money first, people who put off their real plans until later, until they are rich, are not necessarily wrong. People who want only to live, and who reckon living is absolute freedom, the exclusive pursuit of happiness, the sole satisfaction of their desires and instincts, the immediate enjoyment of the boundless riches of the world [ ... ] such people will always be unhappy. It is true [ ... ] that there are people for whom this kind of dilemma does not arise, or hardly arises, either because they are too poor and have no requirements beyond a slightly better diet, slightly better housing, slightly less work, or because they are too rich, from the start, to understand the import or even the meaning of such a distinction. But nowadays and in our part of the world, more and more people are neither rich nor poor: they dream of wealth, and could become wealthy; and that is where their misfortunes begin."
-from "Things: A Story of the Sixties — Georges Perec

Men of the world who value the Way all turn to books. But books are nothing more than words. Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down. The world values words and hands down books but, though the world values them, I do not think them worth valuing. What the world takes to be values is not real value. — Zhuangzi

But wherever I am, whatever this world is, I've just got to be sure I'm me and that's what's real ... Know yourself and go in swinging. If it hurts when you hit it, it might be real, too. — Patrick Ness

I think YouTube used to have a negative connotation, like it was the place where the rejects went and made careers, but I'm proud to be YouTuber. I wanted to be in that first generation of YouTube stars who transitioned into the 'real world.' It was a really good way to build my business. — Lindsey Stirling

Among true and real friends, all is common; and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friend. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

FOAM OF THE DAZE is a novel like no other, a sexy, innocent, smart and sweet cartoon of a world which then begins, little by little, to bleed real blood until, in the end, the blood turns out to be our own. I read it nearly thirty years ago in its previous incarnation as Mood Indigo and I loved it then; it's still one of my favorite books in the whole world — Jim Krusoe

Reality television paints a simple black-and-white world of good characters and bad characters; people we want to root for and people we want to see ruined. There is none of the gray ambiguity that colors real life. I no longer watch a lot of reality television, but sometimes I can't look away from 'Honey Boo Boo.' I just can't. — Molly O'Keefe

Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can't TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don't even know. I'm aware, in an intellectual way. That I felt all those things about him, but this emotions are far away now.
What's so strange to me is that I can't even force my heart back to that place where I felt that all consuming passion. That makes me feel distant from myself. Who WAS I then? Will I ever be able to get back to that place? Reading the letters again made me wonder: Which is the real me? The one who saw the world in that emotionally saturated way, or the me who sees it the way I do now? — Bill Shapiro

I can not but hate the prospect of slavery's expansion. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world-enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites-causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity. — Abraham Lincoln

It's, it's like I'm in the fourth dimension and somebody is asking me to describe it verbally and that's what the fourth dimension is all about, is no words, no symbols, no images, all pure, real energy and vibrations. And, and if I thought about how cruel of a world this is, I would probably just commit suicide after a while, if that was what I spent my energy thinking about. I would definitely not have any strength left to create music. — John Frusciante

What we want is a social harmony, even as we live in a world where any idea about 'the real thing' is as likely to evoke the ancient memory of an advertisement for a soda pop as anything solid or necessary. — Douglas Lain

Most definitely the real world, Komatsu said, and he rubbed his inner forearm. Pale veins rose to the surface. They were not very healthy-looking blood vessels - blood vessels damaged by years of drinking, smoking, an unhealthy lifestyle, and various literary intrigues. — Haruki Murakami

Real breakthroughs are not found because you want to develop some new technology, but because you are curious and want to find out how the world is. — Anton Zeilinger

When times are tough, constant conflict may be good politics but in the real world, cooperation works better. After all, nobody's right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day. — William J. Clinton

How do I say it? In this language there are no words for how the real world collapses. I could say it in my own and the sacred mounds would come into focus, but I couldn't take it in this dingy envelope. So I look at the stars in this strange city, frozen to the back of the sky, the only promises that ever make sense. — Joy Harjo

Every bubble consists of a trend that can be observed in the real world and a misconception relating to that trend. The two elements interact with each other in a reflexive manner. — George Soros

I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people's minds and souls. — Sylvia Plath

I still like to live in a whimsical world that seems more romantic and fantasy-related because real life seems so hard — Taylor Swift

Government has really been growing, a lot of largesse, but the people in the real world aren't. And that's what has to change. Government has no conformity at all with the real world. — Michele Bachmann

for the first time, there burst upon me the idea that there might be real marvels all about us, that the visible world might be only a curtain to conceal huge realms uncharted by my very simple theology. And that started in me something with which, on and off, I have had plenty of trouble since - the desire for the preternatural, simply as such, the passion for the Occult. Not everyone has this disease; those who have will know what I mean. I once tried to describe it in a novel. It is a spiritual lust; and like the lust of the body it has the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting while it lasts. It is probably this passion, more even than the desire for power, which makes magicians. — C.S. Lewis

Hollywood is like living in a weird bubble. A bunch of people take care of you and get you stuff, and you're the center of that little microcosmic world. You start believing that it is real and ... you deserve it. — Chris Pine

We are not encouraged, on a daily basis, to pay careful attention to the animals we eat. On the contrary, the meat, dairy, and egg industries all actively encourage us to give thought to our own immediate interest (taste, for example, or cheap food) but not to the real suffering involved. They do so by deliberately withholding information and by cynically presenting us with idealized images of happy animals in beautiful landscapes, scenes of bucolic happiness that do not correspond to anything in the real world. The animals involved suffer agony because of our ignorance. The least we owe them is to lessen that ignorance. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

There's real trouble in the world. The kind that can't be fixed. The kind we lie awake keeping vigil against. Love is not trouble. It's all we have to light our days, to bring music to the time we've been given. — Barb Johnson

Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true. — J.R.R. Tolkien

That's what it is. That's what my morning was like: all these real physical heavy positive vibrations, the soul of this tape. The fuzzy groove. The meaning of it all, if it has one: All love, all the time. Peace and happiness in every day. Peace and happiness with cow blood dripping from your hands, bright blood staining your fingerprints because you didn't glove up since you don't normally do prep work. Peace and happiness when you're making a list of everything that's wrong with the world and squinting your eyes tight trying to imagine your way out of it. Peace, peace, peace, happiness, happiness, happiness. — John Darnielle

The world, that is, of earthquake and cataclysm, cyclone and devastation; the violent matrix, the real world of unmastered, unmasterable physical stress that is entirely inimical to man because of its indifference. Ocean, forest, mountain, weather - these are the inflexible institutions of that world of unquestionable reality which is so far removed from the social institutions which make up our own world that we men must always, whatever our difference, conspire to ignore them. For otherwise we would be forced to acknowledge our incomparable insignificance and the insignificance of those desires that might be the pyrotechnic tigers of our world and yet, under the cold moon and the frigid round dance of the unspeakably alien planets, are nothing but toy animals cut from coloured paper. — Angela Carter

It feels weird, being out in the real world again. Around people just living their lives like normal. Their presence is oppressive. The very fact that the world is going on as usual, like nothing ever happened, makes me want to scream. I know it's irrational to expect everything to grind to a halt because of June, but still. A wave of anxiety builds in my chest, my head pounding so loud it drowns out the noise of people talking and tapping away on their laptops. — Hannah Harrington

What I could have done in real life only by throwing a bomb which would have led to the scaffold I tried to achieve in painting by using color of maximum purity. In this way I satisfied my urge to destroy old conventions, to disobey in order to re-create a tangible, living, and liberated world. — Maurice De Vlaminck

There is also the very real possibility that, in the justice of God, one of the reasons He uses the weak and the foolish of the world is so that no argument could be made later that certain people were advantaged in some unfair way by that which was unearned-either in the premortal life or here. Hence it seems prudent for us to realize that just because one is set apart or ordained to a certain calling or assignment he or she must not expect to be set apart from the stresses of life. There appear to be no immunities. — Neal A. Maxwell

Nothing in this world is real — Neale Donald Walsch

Human activity is destroying the natural systems that we depend upon for our survival. Our most basic instinct as humans is to survive; yet we continue to destroy our life-support machine. Connected humans understand this terrible contradiction; disconnected humans are not able to.

Not all humans are responsible: just those who are part of Industrial Civilization. Industrial Civilization depends on economic growth and the unsustainable use of natural resources, so it has developed a complex set of tools for keeping people disconnected from the real world and living a life that keeps civilization running. Humans have been manipulated in order to be part of a destructive system.

The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization. — Keith Farnish

Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world. — Wassily Kandinsky

The kiss was everything she hadn't dared let herself think about. Slow. Hot. Hungry. His lips molded to hers, drinking up her small, breathless exhale before his tongue skimmed across hers. Bree reached out and gripped his shirt, tugging him until he was flush against her. The man knew how to kiss, and she felt her mind emptying of everything but how incredible his mouth felt working deeper into hers. Every nip, every silky stroke of his tongue, every breath dragged between their mouths made her hold on tighter. The second he stopped, the real world would slide back into place, and more than anything, she wanted this. Wanted Finn with an unexpected yearning that burrowed deeper with each second he continued to kiss her. He cupped the nape of her neck, tipping her head back as he deepened the kiss. She whimpered, catching his bottom lip between hers. His thumb trailed along her jawline, and she shuddered in its wake, wanting his mouth there. Wanting — Sydney Somers

The Vale is not real.

It's a lie told by mothers and fathers to give their starving children a reason for the horror. There is no reason.

There is nothing but this world. It is our beginning and our end. Our one chance at joy before the dark. — Pierce Brown

There's the physical world . . . but there's also our own private inner worlds, the world of our thoughts. A world made of ideas instead of stuff. It's just as real as our world, but it's inside. — Joe Hill

As she walked, the horror stories she'd heard from Felix and the others became real. This is what their underground efforts were fighting against. These camps, these guards, were reality to thousands of people ... Reality to the person who had just made the trip up the chimney. If they did not stop this madness, it would be the end of them all. — Tricia Goyer

So there are three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized satisfaction. Three frustrations, three disturbances, and two disillusionments. It is, what has been called in a different context, a cumulative trauma; the cumulative trauma of desire. And this is when it works. — Adam Phillips

I see the people that do the real work, and what in a way is really sad is that the people that are often the most giving, hardworking, and capable of making this world better don't really have the ambition and ego to be a leader - they don't see any interest in the rewards, they don't care if their names ever appear in the press, they actually enjoy the process of helping others, they are truly in the moment. — Richard Linklater

She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ... — Dan Simmons

Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding," Joseph exclaimed. "If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?"
The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: "There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun. — Hermann Hesse

In the old stories, despite the impossibility of the incidents, the interest is always real and human. The princes and princesses fall in love and marry
nothing could be more human than that. Their lives and loves are crossed by human sorrows ... The hero and heroine are persecuted or separated by cruel stepmothers or enchanters; they have wanderings and sorrows to suffer; they have adventures to achieve and difficulties to overcome; they must display courage, loyalty and address, courtesy, gentleness and gratitude. Thus they are living in a real human world, though it wears a mythical face, though there are giants and lions in the way. The old fairy tales which a silly sort of people disparage as too wicked and ferocious for the nursery, are really 'full of matter,' and unobtrusively teach the true lessons of our wayfaring in a world of perplexities and obstructions. — Andrew Lang

Shuffled footsteps caught her attention. "Hey," Owen said. She took in the sight of him, dressed in a new borrowed outfit - a long sleeved navy T-shirt and a pair of khakis that had been too long for John. The shirt highlighted the difference in his eyes.
Well, okay, there was the reason she hadn't been thinking about the real world. — Laura Kaye

In my experience ideology is a lot like religion; it's a belief system and most people cling to it long after it becomes clear that their ideology doesn't describe the real world. — Maureen F. McHugh

What is without dispute ... is that the readers need [the BookWorld] just as much as we need them - to bring order to their apparent chaos, if nothing else. — Jasper Fforde

I know who the real hero is, and it isn't me or brave Lanaya. It's an old man with a white beard and a walking stick and a heart so big it won't let him stop thinking he can change the world by writing down things in a book no one will ever read. — Rodman Philbrick

Setting is the bedrock of your story. If you choose a real-world backdrop, be certain you get your facts straight. — Lynn Flewelling

Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that.
I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make to world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist. — Peter Shaffer

I want to know something real. Something that not everyone in the world knows about you." His puppy face deepens, his mouth sagging at the corners.

"I can't get to sleep when I have socks on, but my feet are always cold so it's kind of a problem. — Jasmine Warga

Because this isn't the movies, Doc. In the real world, when a seventeen-year-old guy gets a love letter from his best friend, he doesn't suddenly decide to love her back. He runs screaming. — Aimee L. Salter

There is that moment when you first wake up and your dreams are still hovering like a fine mist in the air. For a tiny fragment of time you feel as though you could choose to live in either reality. In fact, in those seconds, as the dream replays in your mind, still so fresh, it seems more real, and this world seems unreal and fuzzy. I want to make the choice to go back to the dream, to live there. — Kitty Thomas

Faith is the deep want of the soul. We have faculties for the spiritual, as truly as for the outward world. God, the foundation of all existence, may become to the mind the most real of all beings. The believer feels himself resting on an everlasting foundation. — William Henry Channing

The board transported its jurisdiction to a never-never land where a Dorothy of the new millennium might exclaim: "They still call it Kansas, but I don't think we're in the real world anymore." — Stephen Jay Gould

For such a long time, when you're a writer, you really are just writing for yourself, and maybe a few friends. So it's really amazing when your book gets out there and more people are reading and responding to it. It really makes the world of the books feel real. — Cassandra Clare

What we're supposed to do as actors is be able to portray real human beings and emotions. And if you grow up in this bubble of showbiz and you only know people who make movies, you don't really have an understanding of the world outside. — Emily Browning

To step inside a sealed, twelve-by-twelve-foot space with a wild animal that is many times your size is extremely hazardous to say the least. Yet sending these frightened animals out into the real world without giving them tools to safely deal with a new environment...could be disastrous. It would not be unlike sending a soldier on a mission without any training. Clearly, it was not a scenario lending itself toward safety or success for either horse or new owner. — Kim Meeder

Moving is easy, exciting, an adventure - when you're young. Later, not so much. I love Massachusetts, my old home. Sometimes, late at night, I even study the real estate ads in my old hometown. But it's not even a fantasy. My parents are both gone. The world I left doesn't exist anymore. Neither does the person I was. — Susan Estrich

While girls average a healthy five hours a week on video games, boys average 13. The problem? The brain chemistry of video games stimulates feel-good dopamine that builds motivation to win in a fantasy while starving the parts of the brain focused on real-world motivation. — Warren Farrell

In passing I draw attention to another English expression which often occurs in Dutch texts: "the real world". In Dutch - and I am afraid not in Dutch alone - its usage is almost always a symptom of a violent anti-intellectualism. — Edsger Dijkstra

I hated having to go out on the block and scramble - that's the worst job in the world, especially if you ain't making any real money. — Method Man

Real intelligence is a creative use of knowledge, not merely an accumulation of facts. The slow thinker who can finally come up with an idea of his own is more important to the world than a walking encyclopedia who hasn't learned how to use this information productively. — Susan Winebrenner

A book had always been a door to another world ... a world much more interesting and fantastical than reality. But she had finally discovered that life could be even more wonderful than fantasy.
And that love could fill the real world with magic. — Lisa Kleypas

It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen. — Anthony Burgess

Buddhas can take you to the boundary line of meditation and samadhi. That is the only difference between meditation and samadhi. If your mind has become utterly quiet and silent, but only the master is there, then it is meditation. If your mind has become so quiet that even the master has disappeared, it is samadhi. The last barrier is going to be the master. He will take you out of the world, but one day you will have to leave him too. And the real master will always keep you alert that you have to leave him one day, at the final stage. — Rajneesh

If we are going to see real development in the world then our best investment is WOMEN! — Desmond Tutu

I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from. — David Foster Wallace

The underlying reason for convergence seems to be that all organisms are under constant scrutiny of natural selection and are also subject to the constraints of the physical and chemical factors that severely limit the action of all inhabitants of the biosphere. Put simply, convergence shows that in a real world not all things are possible. — Simon Conway Morris

Great! I hope different police officers are here this time."
"Might be, but we're in the same police jurisdiction. I'm certain from the last time you were here, they probably have a record about you. What was it you said? You were playing some game re-enactment the last time you were injured?"
"Yes. How did your brother come up the idea of a paint-ball game? That's a good one."
"He's played them here before. He would like to bring the game back to our world, but we fight for real. — Terry Spear

Honest, open communication is the only street that leads us into the real world ... We then begin to grow as never before. And once we are on this road, happiness cannot be far away. — John Powell

Most Christians seem to have two kinds of lives, their so-called real life and their so-called religious one. Not (C. S.) Lewis. The barrier so many of us find between the visible and the invisible world was just not there for him. It had become natural for Lewis to live ordinary life in a supernatural way. — Walter Hooper

A man's work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, and you can only gain a true knowledge of him by inferences from little actions, of which he is unconscious, and from fleeting expressions, which cross his face unknown to him. Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem. But in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. His pretentiousness will only expose his vacuity. The lathe painted to look like iron is seen to be but a lathe. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind. To the acute observer no one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of the soul. — W. Somerset Maugham

The love of solitude, when cultivated in the morn of life, elevates the mind to a noble independence, but to acquire the advantages which solitude is capable of affording, the mind must not be impelled to it by melancholy and discontent, but by a real distaste to the idle pleasures of the world, a rational contempt for the deceitful joys of life, and just apprehensions of being corrupted and seduced by its insinuating and destructive gayeties. — Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

Rediscover the real meaning of the Great Commission. Beginning in our own prayer and devotional lives, we must begin to feel the compassion of the Lord for a lost and dying world. As we have already seen, the Great Commission is not something that was given to a tiny group of specially trained and educated envoys. It was given to all Christians - to the whole Church. It is something that we are all to be engaged in naturally every day. — K.P. Yohannan

With mindfulness you can see the real owner of things. Do you think this is your world, your body? It is the world's world, the body's body. If you tell it, Don't get old, does the body listen? Does your stomach ask permission to get sick? We only rent this house; why not find out who really owns it? — Ajahn Chah

The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men
from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

It was one of the most sublimely exhilarating moments of my life. I was half a step in front of the real, an inch or two beyond the confines of my body, and when the thing happened just as I thought it would, I felt my skin had become transparent. I wasn't occupying space anymore so much as melting into it. What was around me was also inside me, and I had only to look into myself in order to see the world. — Paul Auster

You cannot expect the man who made this shield to live easily under the rule of man who worked the sheath of this dagger ... You are the builders of coursed stone walls, the makers of straight roads and ordered justice and disciplined troops. We know that, we know it all too well. We know that your justice is more sure than ours, and when we rise against you, we see our hosts break against the discipline of your troops, as the sea breaks against a rock. And we do not understand, because all these things are the ordered pattern, and only the free curves of the shield-boss are real to us. We do not understand. And when the time comes that we begin to understand your world, too often we lose the understanding of our own. — Rosemary Sutcliff

The world of "magick" is, nine times out of ten, a world where people can hide their deep-set insecurity and personal damage behind illusion, constructed identities and claims to privileged knowledge, power or spiritual status. A gaudy carnival magic show, conducted with props that have long since begun to disintegrate with age, that seems to function only to distract people from the real magic that is occurring all around them, in every facet of their lives, every day of their lives. While the rituals and magical techniques of the Temple seem overly simplistic in comparison with the loftier Qabalahs, tables of correspondences and secret formulae of "high" magick, they have one thing which high magick quite often forgets: a concrete function. — Jason Louv

A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion, does not act as if it is real, so he escapes the suffering. — Gautama Buddha

One of the things that made me suffer no regret when I was called away from the cramped intellectual jail of atheism into a wider and more wonderful world, was my growing conviction that my fellow atheists were shallow, men without insight into real human nature. — John C. Wright

We must have kings, we must have nobles; nature is always providing such in every society; only let us have the real instead of the titular. In every society some are born to rule, and some to advise. The chief is the chief all the world over, only not his cap and plume. It is only this dislike of the pretender which makes men sometimes unjust to the true and finished man. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people - a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance. - William Longgood, The Queen Must Die — Susan Wiggs

My family was all born in Sicily and I'm Italian-American. They're the real thing. They're authentic Italians, and honestly they're the most open-minded, nicest people in the world and nothing can really offend them. That's the way I think true Sicilians are. — Vinny Guadagnino

He wondered if he'd be better off staying at the bum shelter with his false bum and forgetting about his real bum. But he couldn't. His bum was trying to take over the world. — Griffiths, Andy

Science is ... a powerful way, indeed - to study the natural world. Science is not particularly effective ... in making commentary about the supernatural world. Both worlds, for me, are quite real and quite important. They are investigated in different ways. They coexist. They illuminate each other. — Francis Collins

There is a curious comfort in letting go. After the agony, letting go brings numbness, and after the numbness, clarity. As if I can see the world for the first time, and my place in it, independent of you, a whole vista of what may be. Even if it is not grand or inspiring, it is real and solid, unlike the fantasy I've built around you. I will do this.
I will triumph over you. — Julie Berry

Instead of Passover pointing backward to the great sacrifice by which God had rescued his people from slavery in Egypt, this meal pointed forward to the great sacrifice by which God was to rescue his people from their ultimate slavery, from death itself and all that contributed to it (evil, corruption, and sin). This would be the real Exodus, the real "return from exile." This would be the establishment of the "new covenant" spoken of by Jeremiah (31:31). This would be the means by which "sins would be forgiven" - in other words, the means by which God would deal with the sin that had caused Israel's exile and shame and, beyond that, the sin because of which the whole world was under the power of death. — N. T. Wright

In previous ages the word 'art' was used to cover all forms of human skill. The Greeks believed that these skills were given by the gods to man for the purpose of improving the condition of life. In a real sense, photography has fulfilled the Greek ideal of art; it should not only improve the photographer, but also improve the world. — David Hurn

Because ... because how can I expect the world to be a better place if I ain't gonna try real hard to make it better?
— John Shors

Illusion doesn't mean that something is not real. Illusion simply means that something is less real than something else. This life and this world certainly exist - who is to say the reality of the dream is not real? — Frederick Lenz

Hopefully I can be a good light in the hockey world and promote faith as something that's really real. — Mike Fisher

The real wealth, not only of America, but of the world, is in the resources of the ground we stand on, and in the resources of the humankind. — Norman Cousins