Quotes about Reality

In Christ we are invited to participate in the reality of God and the reality of the world at the same time, the one not without the other.

I think that even in this place we ought to live as if we had no wishes and no future, and just be our true selves.

The source of a Christian ethic is not the reality of one's own self, not the reality of the world, nor is it the reality of norms and values. It is the reality of God that is revealed in Jesus Christ.

The attempt to understand reality apart from that action of God in and upon reality means living in anabstraction; it means failing to live in reality and vacillating between the extremes of a servile attitude toward the status quo and a protest in principle against it. Only God's becoming human makes possible an action that is genuinely in accord with reality. The world remains world. But it only does so because God has taken care of it and declared it to be under God's rule.

The wise man is the one who sees reality as it is, and who sees into the depths of things. That is why only that man is wise who sees reality in God. To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential.

Since the appearance of Christ, ethics can be concerned with only one thing: to partake in the reality of the fulfilled will of God.

Without God, all seeing and perceiving of things and laws become abstraction, a separation from both origin and goal.

The existence of any Christian communal life essentially depends on whether or not it succeeds at the right time in promoting the ability to distinguish between a human ideal and God's reality, between spiritual and emotional community.

Falsehood' is the destruction of, and hostility to, reality as it is in God; anyone who tells the truth cynically is lying.

the Liturgy is accomplished faith, lived faith. It plunges us into the full reality of the truth of faith; it creates the spiritual space in which the world of faith or, more correctly, the world disclosed by faith penetrates every pore of our being, in which we breathe the supernatural air; it brings us to the ultimate reality which, in the holy Sacrifice of the Mass and in the sacraments, we even touch ontologically.

Some may not believe my account; they may think it was some kind of wish fulfillment during a point of severe trauma. I don't have to defend my experience. I know what happened to me. For those of us whose faith is in the reality of heaven, no amount of evidence is necessary.

Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me. I escape, one way or another. No more walls.