Reality Quotes - Page 52

Jehovah, the Christian name for God derived from the Hebrew Yahweh, (from the letters YHWH), is translated as "I AM." YOU ARE the essence of life—the Cosmic Consciousness that creates, lives in, and destroys all things. In Buddhism, your true nature is referred to as your “Buddha Nature.” Muslims refer to it as Allah, Native tribes have often called it the Great Spirit, Taoists refer to it as the Tao, and numerous other cultures throughout history have all created their own distinctive names for it. But the one eternal reality that these cultures point to remains the same—and this reality is YOU.

George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.

But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing?Who knows? Maybe that was 'despair.' What Turgenev called 'disillusionment.' Or Dostoyevsky, 'hell.' Or Somerset Maugham, 'reality.' Whatever the label, I figured it was me.

As soon as you wink, you close your eyes to reality.

You Believe what you see, You Perceive what you do.

If truth is relative, then it’s cousin is anarchy.

[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.

Greatness is not greater than you. You have total control over greatness. You can decide to be great and it will happen.

You get what you give. What you put into things is what you get out of them.

…I bet I’ll haunt your dreams tonight. I just wan’ed to paint a picture in your head. I wan’ed you to see me as the monster I can often be. You see, you are what you allow people to know ‘bout you. Truth or lies or some combination of the two, is what makes you who you are. So, you don’t know me yet. But what I need you to know about me for now, is that I can’t be trusted.

How was I supposed to know what’s real and what’s not? It feels like I’m the only one who doesn’t know the difference.

The definition of a professional is one who does a job well even when they don't like it.

At what point do you no longer need other people to support the decisions you’ve made about your own reality?

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

What the sense feels, what the spirit perceives, is never an end in itself. But sense and spirit would like to persuade you that they are the end of all things: they are as vain as that.

I’d have to prove to everyone, including Ellia, that I was more than some guy she used to know, that what we shared had and still mattered. She may have forgotten the promise we made on the beach, but I hadn’t, and it was up to me to backup those words with action. Memories and ghosts were for the dead. Living things moved, and I was never one to stand still." ~Liam

Luck is not some esoteric, godlike phenomenon. Luck is countable but undefinable. Luck easily can be explained as number of factors acting in a favour of a person. These factors' behaviour could be statistically proved , and the probability of such result is possible. It is not related to something explainable event. Actually, the miracle would be if these events (luck) are not in presence in our life. The matter as then would be mathematics proved wrong. So, make your luck!"

It is not cynical to admit the past has been turned into a fiction. It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added or removed. Wars have been aggrandized, and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are redressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and visions and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice! Do you know why the history of the Tower is in such turmoil? Because too many powerful men are fighting for the pen, fighting to write their story over our dead bodies. They know what is at stake: immortality, the character of civilization, and influence beyond the ages. They are fighting to see who gets to mislead our grandchildren.

I can only begin the process of saving myself when I surrender to the reality that I can’t. And what greater place to surrender that reality than to an infant who surrendered Himself to me so that I might surrender myself to Him.

Stories are epically important to how we view and interact in the world around us. We define ourselves, our abilities and even our goals by the stories we believe and share. These stories become part of our personal view of our world.

Don’t be an interpreter of reality, be a visionary. Don’t think about it, see it!

Melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. [But we must face] the painful awareness that in all likelyhood one's own character would not have stood firm.

THIS IS WHAT A MAN LOOKS LIKE. HE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE AESTHETICALLY PLEASING; HE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE MUSCULAR; HE DESERVES NOT TO BE PHOTOSHOPPED. HE IS HUMAN, AND HE HAS BLEMISHES. HERE HE STANDS, VISIBLE. HE SEES YOU ALL, COUNTLESS INVISIBLE OTHERS LIKE HIM. THIS BODY IS ACCEPTABLE — PUBESCENT, AWKWARD, MARRED. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE INVISIBLE. WE ARE ALL GOOD ENOUGH. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH OUR BODIES.

Not to experience the reality why you are created is not to know God

A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.

I don't pay much attention to the distinction between fantasy and science fiction–or between “genre” and “mainstream” for that matter. For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors-which is the logic of narratives in general–over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves–they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling accidental universe tolerable. That we call such a tendency “the narrative fallacy” doesn’t mean it doesn’t also touch upon some aspect of the truth.Some stories simply literalize their metaphors a bit more explicitly.