Quotes about Reality

The oldest theory of art belongs to the Greeks, who regarded art as an imitation (mimesis) of reality. The strength of that theory is that it explains the way in which art takes its materials from real life.

How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.

Assuming if there's such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

I'm not cynical, but the reality is that life is mortal. Terrible, sad things happen. Everybody loses friends and family. I'll be on tour and get really scared if my wife won't answer her phone within one minute. I'm sensitive.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

I think the American people, with some justification, think that most politicians live in la-la land.

To be candid, some people have given positive thinking a bad name. I can't stand to hear some gung-ho individual say that with positive thinking you can just do 'anything.' If you think about that one for a moment, you recognize the absurdity of it.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

Revelation is something communicated from infinite agency or reality to the finite mind. But (in Farrer's picture) this is not a matter of God just interrupting the process of the world to 'insert' something alien into the gap; it happens as a result of what happens in the world of finite agents or substances, as these finite realities are modified in their relations to one another, drawn into newly meaningful shapes.

All essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge.

How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life