Reality Questions Quotes & Sayings

The mathematical question is "Why?" It's always why. And the only way we know how to answer such questions is to come up, from scratch, with these narrative arguments that explain it. So what I want to do with this book is open up this world of mathematical reality, the creatures that we build there, the questions that we ask there, the ways in which we poke and prod (known as problems), and how we can possibly craft these elegant reason-poems. — Paul Lockhart

Fear of being killed and fear of killing attracts people to killers and murders. Anyone who has covered homicides for a daily paper soon learns this reality from the questions people ask of a story over coffee. — Charles Bowden

'Alien' asked ground-breaking questions about eco-politics and female empowerment. 'The Matrix' delved deeper into the concept of perception versus reality than perhaps any other film I know. But for some reason, we tend not to remember the significance of their writing. — Jason Reitman

Lies of omission do not exist. The concept is a very human one. It is the product of your story writing again. You have written a story about the truth, making emotional demands of it, and in particular, of those in possession of it. Your demands are based on a feeling of entitlement to the facts, which is very childish. You can never know all of the facts. Only I can. And since it's impossible for me to reveal all facts to you, it is my discretion alone that decides which facts will be revealed in the finite time we have. If I do not volunteer information you deem critical to your fate, it possibly means that I am a scoundrel, but it does not mean that I am a liar. And it certainly means you did not ask the right questions.
One can make either true statements or false statements about reality. All of the statements I make are true. — Scratch

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

The distinctive contribution that metaphysics makes to our understanding of reality is first that it considers questions about features of reality that the sciences don't, such as the intrinsic nature of causation or the dynamic character of temporal experience. — L.A. Paul

The classic theology of my tradition comes from the French Renaissance. [William] Shakespeare was born in 1564, the year [John] Calvin died, and that theology was very influential in England in his lifetime. I think Shakespeare was attentive to questions raised by it, about human nature, history, reality itself. I find the two literatures to be mutually illuminating. — Marilynne Robinson

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

One can get closer to reality and the facts by using words, questions and answers. — Sandor Marai

I should point out, nevertheless, that even though incomplete data can lead to a false picture, this is far different from the (false) picture obtained by those who choose to ignore empirical data to invent a picture of reality (young earthers, for example), or those who instead require the existence of something for which there is no observable evidence whatsoever (like divine intelligence) to reconcile their view of creation with their a priori prejudices, or worse still, those who cling to fairly tales about nature that presume the answers before questions can even be asked. — Lawrence M. Krauss

So often we focus on finding answers to life's mysteries ...
when in reality, a wiser approach is to start asking better questions, and more of them. — Dana Gore

The world that contains the possibility of evil is the one that also contains the greatest possibility of good. And the question of why God allows evil to happen has to be put against the question of what a world where evil could not happen would be like. It's by working on those questions that people can come to some resolution in their minds about the reality of evil and what it means. — Dallas Willard

No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern. — Stephen Jay Gould

Feynman's cryptic remark, "no one is that much smarter ... ," to me, implies something Feynman kept emphasizing: that the key to his achievements was not anything "magical" but the right attitude, the focus on nature's reality, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions. — Philip Warren Anderson

Their eyes had seen so much that they no longer distinguished between dream and reality. And they had so few illusions they were through asking questions of anyone, even of themselves. — Patrick Chamoiseau

I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content. — Robert E. Howard

Meantime do you see me as still working on the book, still trying to answer such questions as: Is there any ultimate reality, external, conscious and ever-present etc. etc. that can be realised by any such means that may be acceptable to all creeds and religions and suitable to all climes and countries? Or do you find me between Mercy and Understanding, between Chesed and Binah (but still at Chesed) - my equilibrium, and equilibrium is all, precarious - balancing, teetering over the awful unbridgeable void, the all-but unretraceable path of God's lightning back to God? ... Though it is perhaps a good idea under the circumstances to pretend at least to be proceeding with one's great work on "Secret Knowledge," then one can always say when it never comes out that the title explains this deficiency. — Malcolm Lowry

But humans are a curious species. We wonder, we seek answers. Living in this vast world that is by turns kind and cruel, and gazing at the immense heavens above, people have always asked a multitude of questions: How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? — Stephen Hawking

The Bible itself is a book that constantly must be wrestled with and re-interpreted ... Bible interpretation is colored by historical context, the reader's bias and current realities. The more you study the Bible, the more questions it raises. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says. — Rob Bell

Early morning, the orange sun is slowly rising, shining forth in empty luminous clarity. The mind and the sky are one, the sun is rising in the vast space of primordial awareness, and there is just this. Yasutani Roshi once said, speaking of satori, that it was the most precious realization in the world, because all the great philosophers had tried to understand ultimate reality but had failed to do so, yet with satori or awakening all of your deepest questions are finally answered: it's just this. — Ken Wilber

Much of the story we have told falls outside the boundaries of modern academic disciplines and their respective histories. Contemporary economics focuses on issues of efficiency in allocation, political science on institutions of governmental power, political theory on questions of justice, sociology on social groups as defined by interactions outside the market. Some division of intellectual labor is of course productive, and the conceptual lenses that each discipline brings to bear may genuinely help us see an aspect of reality that would otherwise remain undetected. Yet those concerned with the moral implications and ramifications of the market
as any self-critical person in modern society ought to be
get a very skewed picture when they view it through only one of these lenses. Seeing the market with the added perspectives offered by the thinkers treated here provides us with a richer and more rounded view. — Jerry Z. Muller

I welcome questions. I hate assumptions. — Red Haircrow

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible? — Duane Michals

Fleeing persecution is not a crime. And we do not seek to pander to a noisy, tiny minority who will never embrace modern multicultural Australia. But there are important truths we must face. There is a history and a reality that we cannot ignore. The challenge before us is real, the questions we grapple with as elemental as life and death. — Bill Shorten

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

Church and State, will, of course, go on for ever, in spite of the fact that it is impossible for them to mingle, and that the confusion of these elements cannot lead to any consistent or even normal results, for there is falsity at the very foundation of it. Compromise between the Church and State in such questions as, for instance, jurisdiction, is, to my thinking, impossible in any real sense. My clerical opponent maintains that the Church holds a precise and defined position in the State. I maintain, on the contrary, that the Church ought to include the whole State, and not simply to occupy a corner in it, and, if this is, for some reason, impossible at present, then it ought, in reality, to be set up as the direct and chief aim of the future development of Christian society! — Anton Chekhov

For that is of course what it means to read a novel and live in it for a while. You are viscerally inside someone else's reality. You feel and understand things you have not known before, and that is both scary and exhilarating. The world becomes more clear, reality more vivid, and your own experience larger. Of course there will be questions. This probing is how we grow and enlarge our sense of the world itself. — Dorothy Allison

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

if you take a positivist position, as I do, questions about reality don't have any meaning. All one can ask is whether imaginary time is useful in formulating mathematical models that describe what we observe. — Stephen Hawking

To face the realities of our lives is not a reason for despair-despair is a tool of your enemies. Facing the realities of our lives gives us motivation for action. For you are not powerless ... You know why the hard questions must be asked. It is not altruism, it is self-preservation-survival. — Audre Lorde

And a friend of mine in the Christys, we used to sit up at night and talk and read and wonder if reincarnation, and if it wasn't reality, what would happen to the human spirit when the body dies? Is there an afterlife? Just questions like that. — Barry McGuire

I think it's science and physics are just starting to learn from all these experiments. These experiments have been carried out hundreds and hundreds of times in all sorts of ways that no physicist really questions the end point. I think that these experiments are very clearly telling us that consciousness is limitless and the ultimate reality. — Robert Lanza

How we ask our questions affects the answers we arrive at. Light appears as a wave if you ask it "a wavelike question" and it appears as a particle if you ask it "a particle-like question." This is a template for understanding how contradictory explanations of reality can simultaneously be true.
And it's not so much true, as our cultural debates presume, that science and religion reach contradictory answers to the same particular questions of human life. Far more often, they simply ask different kinds of questions altogether, probing and illuminating in ways neither could alone. — Krista Tippett

Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other. — John Michael Greer

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

Purpose in the suffering

A crisis-- the kind that knocks the wind out of ya, the kind that makes your blood run cold and alters your perception of all you think your reality "is," THAT kind of crisis brings us not only to our knees, but smack-dab with every question we've ever pondered on God's existence. There is purpose in the suffering. It MAKES us ask eternal questions with eternal answers. Often that's what it takes to wake us up. The suffering is actually merciful, from a God who would literally do ANYTHING to get us to run into His arms. — Carrie Lynn Jones

No trees in sight, just concrete
Still I see
Two roads twist and turn in front of me
No signs, but screams
Which way's reality?
So you choose; yeah, you choose
Maybe you lose
The sidewalk paved in hitches
Broken hearts not fixed by stitches
But morning's coming soon
No right in sight, just questions
And you find
There is no map to Mecca
It's just life
No right answer; perfect marks
It's no big deal; it's just your heart
Falling stars and lightning sparks
This will only sting a bit
We are all just
Magnets for fate
Stumbling, skipping, running at our pace
Making choices, losing voices
Making wishes for forgiveness
But morning's coming soon

And no matter where you sit, how fast you sip
The coffee tastes the same on magnet lips

"Magnets for Fate"
-Electric Freakshow — Cat Patrick

Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. 'Where did the totality of reality come from?' 'Did time have a beginning?' — Brian Greene

I wonder if I talk like a dead man. My daughter once came home from school very excited about some lecture -this was years ago, before I died, though just right before- and she said her English teacher had talked about what the dead sound like in Dante. This funny thing about Dante's dead, which is that they know the past, and even the future, but they don't know the present. About the present they have all these questions for Dante. And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the time. She seemed to feel that really meant something. That and also that the dead know themselves better than the living do. — Rivka Galchen

All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society. — Eric Hoffer

She hadn't had this much to drink in ages, knew she'd pay for it in the morning, but for now, she reveled in this beautiful padding that protected her from the sharp edges of reality
the unanswered questions, the fear that was always with her. — Blake Crouch

Life was messy, filled with countless worries, questions - what ifs. The real question was not how a person conquered the what ifs, but how one learned to live in spite of them - even when faced with the reality that the answers weren't always pretty. — Angela Lynn

Scientists are dedicated to asking questions in the search for truth. But they too are human, and like all humans, they would like their answers to be clean and clear and easy. In their desire for simple solutions, scientists are prone to fall into two traps as they question the reality of God. The first is to throw the baby out with the bath water. And the second is tunnel vision. There is clearly a lot of dirty bath water surrounding the reality of God. Holy wars. Inquisitions. Animal sacrifice. Human sacrifice. Superstition. Stultification. Dogmatism. Ignorance. Hypocrisy. Self-righteousness. Rigidity. Cruelty. Book-burning. Witch-burning. Inhibition. Fear. Conformity. Morbid guilt. Insanity. The list is almost endless. But is all this what God has done to humans or what humans have done to God? It is abundantly evident that belief in God is often destructively dogmatic. Is the problem, then, that humans tend to believe in God, or is the problem that humans tend to be dogmatic? — M. Scott Peck

Between building the new house on our newly subdivided lot, continuing work on some small flip homes, and managing the rentals, Chip had more work than he could do himself, so he had put a crew of workmen together. "The Boys," as we called them, were a talented bunch of hardworking guys who were just as adaptable as Chip seemed to be when it came to making my crazy ideas become reality. I truly could say, "Hey, why don't we take that tree out of the front yard and hang it upside down in the master bedroom," and they would do it, no questions asked. (All right, maybe there'd be a little head scratching. But then they'd shrug their shoulders and get to work.) — Joanna Gaines

Don't ask me those questions! Don't ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don't talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don't want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist. — Susanna Kaysen

I think that our task as filmmakers is to create the most insightful reality given the most pressing questions. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Nobody gets out of this life alive, or so they say. Really? True, the body disintegrates, but is that all? Might we in fact "get out alive"? Might our awareness continue? We all know somebody who died. Where did they go, or more basically, what is even meant by "they" and "where"? Can they, do they, interact with us? Might they be stuck in a new version of earthly reality, unable to move on and needing someone to help them do so? Since death is the most universal human experience aside from birth, these are important questions. — David Kowalewski

Many questions remain in the UFO controversy. Scientists ask how interstellar pilots could survive a trip of hundreds of years while cutting-edge physicists offer speculation of deep space wormholes and the use of zero point energy. For now, we could not do any better than to study MAJIC EYES ONLY and read the accounts of UFO crash retrievals and ponder what a reality that includes diverse intelligent life outside of our planet might mean for us and future generations. — Jim Marrs

Have you questioned reality today? — Michea Bonilla

I know the questions will be around the money, the amount Chelsea had to spend to bring him here but that's the reality of modern football. Big teams only want big players, big players are in big clubs, big clubs want to keep their big players. — Jose Mourinho

The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality[,] consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than an abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research.
"Psychoanalysis and sociology." Pp. 37-39 in
Critical theory and society: A reader,
edited by S. Bronner and D. Kellner.
New York: Routledge. — Erich Fromm

[My] interest as a writer is not in reflecting actual human speech, which, of course, does not occur in sentences and is totally undiagrammable ... My interest is in trying to reflect the reality of experience-how we feel when we talk to each other, how we feel when we're engaging with questions that interest us. — John Green

The deeper we get into reality, the more numerous will be the questions we cannot answer. — Friedrich Von Hugel

I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible. — Karl Jaspers

I spent a long time trying to come to grips with my doubts, when suddenly I realized I had better come to grips with what I believe. I have since moved from the agony of questions that I cannot answer to the reality of answers that I cannot escape, and it's a wonderful relief. — Tom Skinner

What does it mean to be human, to continue to live as human, to remain _faithful_ to the Divine while living in a cultural, sociogeopoltical, and religious world where power disparity between/among humans based on religious world where power disparity between/among humans based on their nationality, citizenship, gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, religion and so forth still prevails? The act of _theologizing_ for me involves responding to these questions and stimulating the practice of liberating and enlarging human possibility in our daily reality. — Namsoon Kang

You reach a certain age when reality grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shouts in your face:"Hey, look, this is what life is." And you have to open your eyes and look at it, listen to it, smell it: people who don't like you, things you don't want to do, things that hurt, things that scare you, questions without answers, feelings you don't understand, feelings you don't want but have no control over.
Reality.
When you gradually come to realise that all that stuff in books, films, television, magazines, newspapers, comics - it's all rubbish. It's got nothing to do with anything. It's all made up. It doesn't happen like that. It's not real. It means nothing. Reality is what you see when you look out of the window of a bus: dour faces, sad and temporary lives, millions of cars, metal, bricks, glass, rain, cruel laughter, ugliness, dirt, bad teeth, crippled pigeons, little kids in pushchairs who've already forgotten how to smile ... — Kevin Brooks

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know. — Ted Chiang

Ultimately there are only two important epistemological questions in philosophy: What is reality? What is man? And the answer can be collapsed into one: The reality is that man is terribly lonely. — Ben Mijuskovic

Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient. — Jaron Lanier

What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

However, if you're navigating the tension between your Bible and your life, or Jesus' ancient ideas and the modern wayward church, or God's kingdom on earth and reality, then welcome. Sometimes it's better to wade through murky waters with a fellow explorer than with an authority. Questions can still be investigated with another learner instead of with one who has only answers. — Jen Hatmaker

We can never know the answers to great spiritual questions, but it's all right not to understand. We have been born and are living on the earth to face directly the reality of living. — Masanobu Fukuoka

What if she were simply to open her bedroom window and throw herself out, head first? Would she really be able to come back and start again? Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was - wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind? Philosophers "came to grips" with this problem a long time ago, Dr. Kellet had told her, rather wearily, it was one of the very first questions they addressed, so there was really no point in her fretting over it. But surely, by its very nature, everyone wrestled with this dilemma anew every time? — Kate Atkinson

In times such as these, life often begs us to seek answers when in reality there are only questions available. — Brian Joyce

The answer to the nature of our existence is somewhere in the middle, and that, of course, is what we're looking for: how to see ourselves in a new picture of ourselves and understand the questions that humans have asked forever, "Who are we, how did we get here, where are we going, and what's the nature of this reality that we're in?" — Edgar Mitchell

Plato used the dialogue format because the exchange of views, the posing and answering of questions, showed that understanding is a living, dynamic process. He distrusted writing because the settled character of the written word makes it look as if truth can be fixed and made to stand still. It is worth remembering that this greatest advocate of the objective reality of truth also believed that our access to that truth was sustained in reasoned discussion. — John Churchill, 1st Duke Of Marlborough

It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed to know to answer all the questions of the universe. Wouldn't that be freaky? Whereas the probability is high that there is a vast reality that we have no way to perceive, that's actually bearing down on us now and influencing everything. — George Saunders

At the fruit of existence, there is a single concept of anonymity. This unknown concept is well known however. All one has to do is simply look behind the mirror for the answer. Yet, the answer won't come until the right question is asked. Because the illusions of reality are dressed in endless reflections, the blind will continue to be guided by the blind. The unknown concept is recognized to those who have tasted the fruit of existence, and as distant as the woman trying to grab Heaven from the reflection of an empty pond. — Lionel Suggs

It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. — David Foster Wallace

I don't think escaping is necessarily a problem, but we can get addicted to almost anything. If you're craving being in this other reality and you don't want to participate in your own reality, those are the times we have to start asking ourselves difficult questions. — Joshua Mohr

To my mind, the best SF addresses itself to problems of the here and now, or even to problems which have never been solved and never will be solved - I'm thinking of Philip K. Dick's work here, dealing with questions of reality, for example. — John Sladek

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

At very best there are two problems with ideology. The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality. It is a straight-edge ruler of a fractal universe. And the second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault here lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary. To the ideologue this would amount to putting the world right, ridding it of ambiguity and of those tedious and endless moral and ethical questions that dog us through life, and that those around us so rarely answer to our satisfaction. — Marilynne Robinson

If literature provides solutions, if it provides answers, then it is lying. Rooted in reality as it is, it can only contribute towards posing the questions more sharply and clearly and more drastically than before. In my opinion, creative literature is an empirical science. — Jens Bjorneboe

Other big questions tackled by ancient cultures are at least as radical. What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato's answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who'd lived their entire lives shacked ina a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to comprehending it. — Max Tegmark

The Work is merely four questions; it's not even a thing. It has no motive, no strings. It's nothing without your answers. These four questions will join any program you've got ad enhance it. Any religion you have-they'll enhance it. If you have no religion, they will bring you joy. And they'll burn up anything that isn't true for you. They'll burn through to the reality that has always been waiting. — Byron Katie

Is it really true... that our aim as historians is in some sense to recapture past reality, "to retrieve the truth about the past?" If so, what do "past reality" and "the truth about the past" mean? How does the historian's understanding of "reality" and "truth" differ - as most surely it does - from that of the direct participant? And what implications does this difference have for what we do as historians? It is not likely that questions of this sort will ever be finally answered. Yet clearly we must keep asking such questions if we are to maintain the highest levels of honesty and self-awareness concerning our work as historians. — Paul A. Cohen

The planning stage of a cruise is often just as enjoyable as the voyage itself, letting one's imagination loose on all kinds of possibilities. Yet translating dreams into reality means a lot of practical questions have to be answered. — Jimmy Cornell

The Search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh. We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore. Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

But it does not really matter how you got here or why; and it doesn't really matter if it was God or the devil or yourself or some ancient chaos that spilled up from the bottom of the sea. What matters now is that you are drowning, and the world you loved before is not your world any longer. The questions of why and how are less pressing than the reality that is your lungs filling with water now. Philosophy and theology won't help you much here, because what you believe existentially about storms or oceans or drowning won't make you stop drowning. Religion won't do you much good down here, because beliefs can't keep you warm when you're twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea. — Jonathan Martin

July 4, the day we celebrate giving our political masters independence from conscience, morality, consequences for evil doing, and basic social and economic reality.
The fireworks are the glowing tears of your children's incinerated futures.
Cheer happy slaves - your only chains are your deluded joys. Cheer and sing, because for you, songs of death are easier than questions of life. — Stefan Molyneux

At the time, acid made me consider questions of reality, the difference, as someone said, between words and silence. It also brought back a lot of latent religious feelings in me that I had turned my back on. — Robert Stone

The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure. — Margaret Atwood

When the main crowd of worshipers reached the short bridge spanning the pond, the ragged sound of honky-tonk music assailed them. A barrelhouse blues was being shouted over the stamping of feet on a wooden floor. Miss Grace, the good-time woman, had her usual Saturday-night customers. The big white house blazed with lights and noise. The people inside had forsaken their own distress for a little while. Passing near the din, the godly people dropped their heads and conversation ceased. Reality began its tedious crawl back into their reasoning. After all, they were needy and hungry and despised and dispossessed, and sinners the world over were in the driver's seat. How long, merciful Father? How long? A stranger to the music could not have made a distinction between the songs sung a few minutes before and those being danced to in the gay house by the railroad tracks. All asked the same questions. How long, oh God? How long? — Maya Angelou

Travel is rebellion in its purest form.
- we follow our heart
- we free ourselves of labels
- we lose control willingly
- we trade a role for reality
- we love the unfamiliar
- we trust strangers
- we own only what we can carry
- we search for better questions, not answers
- we truly graduate
- we, sometimes, choose never to come back. — Anonymous

Philosophic questions are attempts to understand the root nature of reality, existence, and knowledge. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Perceptions are not reality. How you perceive your life, your value, and your destiny doesn't give you the whole picture. You may be seeing yourself and your significance dimly. But your self-perception determines in large measure the way your life will go ... It is vital that those deep questions at the core of your being are answered with truth. Dim or mistaken perceptions that aren't in keeping with reality must be challenged and corrected by the light of God's Word. — Chip Ingram

I decided to no longer wonder what would have happened if things had worked out differently. And instead, I would focus on what was in front of me. I would focus on reality instead of asking myself questions about fictions. — Taylor Jenkins Reid

Subcreation is not just a desire, but a need and a right; it renews our vision and gives us new perspective and insight into ontological questions that might otherwise escape our notice within the default assumptions we make about reality. — Mark J.P. Wolf

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning. — Paul Provenza