Quotes about Reality

'Tis curious that we only believe as deep as we live.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

Satan, whom Paul labeled as "the god of this evil world," is so clever that he has fooled many people into thinking that he doesn't even exist—while in reality he controls their very lives.

Wondering whether Christianity is real is not the same as wondering whether Christianity is true. If you question the truth of Christianity, you can do something tangible about it. You can read books, take a class, or talk to someone about it. But what can you do when you're already convinced it's true but don't experience it as real?

The unqualified affirmation of the universal will of salvation has radically changed the way of conceiving the mission of the Church in the world... The work of salvation is a reality which occurs in history.

in 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. God's reality is not bound by one manifestation of the divine in Jesus but can be found wherever people are being empowered to fight for freedom. Life-giving power for the poor and the oppressed is the primary criterion that we must use to judge the adequacy of our theology, not abstract concepts.

How to reconcile the gospel message of liberation with the reality of black oppression.

Whether theologians acknowledge it or not, all theologies begin with experience... We are all particular human beings, finite creatures, and we create our understanding of God out of our experience. Hopefully, our own experience points to the universal, but it is never identical with it. For when we mistake our own talk about God with ultimate reality, we turn it into ideology.

True poets lead no one unawares. It is nothing other than awareness that poets-that is, creators of all sorts-seek. They do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art.

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death... these are things that unite us all.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.