Quotes about Reality

I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

Men, in general, misunderstand the meaning of death. When the alarm clock goes off in the morning and frightens us from our dreams, we regard this awakening as a terrifying intrusion upon our dream world and do not realize that the alarm arouses us to our real existence, our day world. Do we mortals not act similarly, being frightened when death comes? Do we not also misunderstand that death awakens us to the true reality of ourselves?

In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as "delusion of reprieve." The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be re- prieved at the very last minute.

Reality presents itself always in the form of a specific concrete situation, and since each life situation is unique, it follows that also the meaning of a situation must be unique. Therefore it would not even be possible for meanings to be transmitted through traditions. Only values— which might be defined as universal meanings— can be affected by the decay of traditions… to put it succinctly: the values are dead—long live the meanings.

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.

Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?

Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.

One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality

Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.