Quotes about Reality

We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.

The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense, whereas reality never makes sense.

The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.

Primitive man explored the pharmaceutical avenues of escape from the world with a truly astonishing thoroughness. Our ancestors left almost no natural stimulant, or hallucinant, or stupefacient, undiscovered. Necessity is the mother of invention; primitive man, like his civilized descendant, felt so urgent a need to escape occasionally from reality, that the invention of drugs was fairly forced upon him.

God as a sense of warmth about the heart, God as exultation, God as tears in the eyes, God as a rush of power or thought—that was all right. But God as truth, God as 2 + 2 = 4—that wasn't so clearly all right.

Threequarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Query: how to combine the belief that the world is a to a great extent illusory with belief that it is none the less essential to improve the illusion? How to be simultaneously dispassionate and not indifferent, serene like an old man and active like a young one?

That art thou': 'Behold but One in all things' -God within and God without. There is a way to Reality in and through the soul, and there is a way to Reality in and through the world. Whether the ultimate goal can be reached by following either of these ways to the exclusion of the other is to be doubted. The third, best and hardest way is that which leads to the divine Ground simultaneously in the perceiver and in that which is perceived.

Omission and simplification help us to understand--but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

Love in action is harsh and dreadful when compared to love in dreams.

Stop telling such outlandish tales. Stop turning minnows into whales.

Life is but a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.