Quotes about Reality

Consider your own deepest fears-real or imagined. Actually all fear is born of the imagination, which means that the danger we fear doesn't need to be rational or even real to be potent.

If someone says something that has no basis in truth, it doesn't bother us much. It's the things we fear they might be right about that hurt.

We carry around in our heads these pictures of what our lives are supposed to look like, painted by the brush of out intentions. It's the great, deep secret of humanity that in the end none of our lives look the way we thought they would. As much as we wish to believe otherwise, most of life is a reaction to circumstances.

If you had refused to descend to men, you would have been my distant dream. If you had refused to sow your word, I would love you without hearing it. If you had hesitated and fled from the crucifixion, and I were not saved, I would still love you. If you were a myth, I would leave reality and live with you in a dream.

Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.

So when we talk about God we're using language, language that employs a vast array of words and phrases and forms to describe a reality that is fundamentally beyond words and phrases and forms.

He's alive in death, but in profound torment, because he's living with the realities of not properly dying the kind of death that actually leads a person into the only kind of life that's worth living.

What this particular religious system that I was working in did was ever so subtly divide the world up into two spheres Ãƒ¢Ã¢'¬Ã‚¦ the spiritual, and then the rest of life. As if spiritual is a dimension of life that some people have, and some don't. As if spiritual means less real than the stuff of everyday life like money and bodies and kids and houses and jobs. As if spiritual is about another time and another place when you die and leave this place.

Heaven, for Jesus, wasn't less real, but more real.

Until you stop wishing things were different, accept the way they are, and take up the sole responsibility of doing something about it, nothing will change.

What is truth but to live for an idea?

I think you had better learn to control that imagination of yours,Anne, if you can't distinguish between what is real and what isnt.