Quotes about Reality

The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they're liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see. We need a kingdom of heaven in Heaven, if only because it can't be realized.

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

I beg you to believe that life is not a process, it's a drama

You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.

The pretended desires of many to behold the glory of Christ in heaven, who have no view of it by faith while they are here in this world, are nothing but self-deceiving imaginations.

Still, he never felt that the sermons he wrote at the cottage were good. By the time he got back to Washington to preach them, they no longer excited him. They seemed cold, lifeless. This was probably because Peter's best sermons rose out of the soil of emotion in his own heart. That emotion had to be a present, valid reality. He could not conjure it up.

The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return....Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realise in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows and that all things are but aspects of one thing a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God 'No,' said Father Brown.

I soon developed myopia and a firm belief that people in books were not only more interesting but more real than people outside of books.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, and you think it's a pig, it's a pig.

When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel... Taking to the road — by which I mean letting the road take you — changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories —in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.

It is not so much the major events as the small day-to-day decisions that map the course of our living. . . Our lives are, in reality, the sum total of our seemingly unimportant decisions and of our capacity to live by those decisions.

Work is the miracle by which talent is brought to the surface and dreams become reality.