Quotes About The Nature Of Reality

#1. At certain times, a silent mind is very important, but 'silent' does not mean closed. The silent mind is an alert, awakened mind; a mind seeking the nature of reality.

Thubten Yeshe

#2. Emotions are not tools of cognition. They tell you nothing about the nature of reality.

Dave Galanter

#3. The development of physics in the twentieth century already has transformed the consciousness of those involved with it. The study (of modern physics) produces insights into the nature of reality very similar to those produced by the study of eastern philosophy.

Gary Zukav

#4. A thousand years ago, scientists who wondered about consciousness and the nature of reality were burned at the stake. We still haven't recovered from that and it's left us with a culture that no longer investigates consciousness, except on the fringes.

David O. Russell

#5. Basically you create your experience through your beliefs about yourself and the nature of reality. Another way to understand this is to realize that you create your experiences through your expectations.

Seth Godin

#6. When you enter deeply into this moment, you see the nature of reality, and this insight liberates you from suffering and confusion. Peace is already there to some extent: the problem is whether we know how to touch it.

Nhat Hanh

#7. I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment ...

David

#8. Whether or not LSD research and therapy will return to society, the discoveries that psychedelics made possible have revolutionary implications for our understanding of the psyche, human nature, and the nature of reality.

Stanislav Grof

#9. Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.

Ted Chiang

#10. Revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality.

Leonard Shlain

#11. In our society, to be obsessed with a vision about how to make a better automobile makes you a genius, but to be obsessed with a vision about the nature of reality makes you a nut.

Rodger Kamenetz

#12. Perhaps a better explanation for why it's so difficult to feel our feelings is that ALL emotion, positive or negative, opens the door to the nature of reality. All of us prefer to avoid pain -- but even more, we want to escape reality.

Dan B. Allender

#13. You know what I've come to realize about you kindly rich liberals who own the world? Nothing is further from your understanding than the nature of reality.

Philip Roth

#14. Monotheism owes its existence not to philosophic speculation about the nature of reality or knowledge or virtue, but to acceptance of reality identified with a supreme being.

Israel Shenker

#15. Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.

Richard Wright

#16. Practice and playing music has to be like a religious experience. It has to be your religion, you know; it has to be your trance. You get something from a devotion to it and digging deeper into yourself and the nature of reality.

Jonathan Harnum

#17. The Science Delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle leaving only the details to be filled in.

Rupert Sheldrake

#18. While Einstein was still a patent clerk he had studied the work of the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, for whom the goal of science was not to discern the nature of reality, but to describe experimental data, the 'facts', as economically as possible.

Manjit Kumar

#19. Truth is that which affirms propositionally the nature of reality as it is.

Ravi Zacharias

#20. So if no theory of philosophy or the sciences can avoid including or presupposing a view of the nature of reality, then no theory can avoid including or presupposing some per se divinity belief.

Roy A. Clouser

#21. We can't understand the nature of reality until we let go of controlling our experience.

Tara Brach

#22. Everyone is a theologian, either conscious or unconscious, in the sense that everyone has some conception of the nature of reality, of the demands of reality, and of those elements in reality that support or threaten meaningful existence.

James Luther Adams

#23. First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

Kathryn Schulz

#24. For the New Testament authors, Jesus' resurrection is not an isolated miracle, but a crucial revelatory disclosure concerning the nature of reality, the identity of God, and the destiny of human beings.

Stefan Alkier

#25. Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?

Duane Michals

#26. This is the textbook position on quantum mechanics and the nature of reality: that the Cartesian separation of mind and matter into two intrinsically different "substances" is false.

Jeffrey M. Schwartz

#27. It's a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. Certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself.

Marilynne Robinson

#28. And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting -
In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural.

Alberto Caeiro

#29. We must remember that we do not observe nature as it actually exists, but nature exposed to our methods of perception. The theories determine what we can or cannot observe ... Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.

Albert Einstein

#30. For centuries the word 'nature' has been used to bolster prejudices or to express, not reality, but a state of affairs that the user would wish to see.

Eva Figes

#31. In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the interference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature.

Roger Caillois

#32. Metaphysics attempts to discover the ultimate nature of reality, and in this sense, the innerspace of science fiction is metaphysical fiction.

Kate Wilhelm

#33. [Hillary Clinton] and I are fine. Are we going to be besties for the rest of our lives? No.

Claire McCaskill

#34. The world of the everyday suddenly seemed nothing but an inverted magic act, lulling its audience into believing in the usual, familiar conceptions of space and time, while the astonishing truth of quantum reality lay carefully guarded by nature's sleights of hand.

Brian Greene

#35. Even though it is common knowledge in our field of Neuroscience, I take immense pleasure every time I realize that our perception of the whole universe emerges from the activity of the little specks of jelly inside our skull.

Abhijit Naskar

#36. Sense of beauty, perception, and the mathematical universe are all part of the same texture.

Neeti Sinha

#37. The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality.

Robert M. Pirsig

#38. If I may take the risk of defining what a spiritual experience is, it is one in which pure awareness reveals itself to you as the maker of reality - where you suddenly discover through insight or meditation or a freak accident that your essential nature is spiritual, non-material.

Deepak Chopra

#39. Natural Theology says not only look up and look out-it also says look down and look in, and you will find the proofs of the reality of God in the depth of your own nature.

Christopher Dawson

#40. Reason, indeed, may oft complain For Nature's sad reality, And tell the suffering heart how vain Its cherished dreams must always be; And Truth may rudely trample down The flowers of Fancy, newly-blown:

Charlotte Bronte

#41. Deep within ourselves, we find the inner being, the inner source of love, which is our true nature.
Love is the only reality, because only love works.

Swami Dhyan Giten

#42. The curse of human nature is imagination. When a long anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities.

Gertrude Atherton

#43. For too long, we've assumed that there is a single template for human nature, which is why we diagnose most deviations as disorders. But the reality is that there are many different kinds of minds. And that's a very good thing.

Jonah Lehrer

#44. If you seek the kernel, then you must break the shell. An likewise, if you would know the reality of Nature, you must destroy the appearance, and the farther you go beyond the appearance, the nearer you will be to the essence.

Meister Eckhart

#45. They should hold themselves absolutely upon the immovable foundation of truth and nature, whereby alone they can save themselves from misapprehensions and from the danger of being entirely carried away from reality into mere dreams and fictions.

Ethan A. Hitchcock

#46. The emphasis in meditation is very much on undistracted awareness: not thinking about things, not analyzing, not getting lost in the story, but just seeing the nature of what is happening in the mind. Careful, accurate observation of the moment's reality is the key to the whole process.

Joseph Goldstein

#47. Realism to be effective must be a matter of selection.genius chooses its materials with a view to their beauty and effectiveness; mere talent copies what it thinks is nature, only to find it has been deceived by the external grossness of things.

Julia Marlowe

#48. Happiness is self-generated. It depends on one's attitude of mind. The basis of happiness, is the simple fact that the deepest reality of our own nature is ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new joy.

Goswami Kriyananda

#49. The true nature of the world was weirder than any bizarre fabric that anyone might weave from the warp and weft of imagination's loom.

Dean Koontz

#50. Our reality is influenced by our notions about reality, regardless of the nature of those notions

Joseph Chilton Pearce

#51. In spite of the air of fablethe public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable. I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity.

Edgar Allan Poe

#52. In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differe in our own realities from the way we are seen by others.

Michael Ondaatje

#53. Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration.

Karen Armstrong

#54. Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic, alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even

Carl Jung

#55. Magic speaks to the child in all of us. No matter how sophisticated we become, there's still a part of us who wants to believe in an alternative reality, where we can defy the laws of nature.

Criss Angel

#56. The concern of your brain is not to see the actual nature of reality, but to represent the reality to you in such a way that suits your needs.

Abhijit Naskar

#57. Music springs from and is replenished by a hidden source which lies outside the world or reality. Music ever spoke to me of a mysterious world beyond, which moved my heart deeply and eloquently intimated its transcendental nature.

Bruno Walter

#58. I tend to over extend myself without really thinking throughthe realities of completing so many projects in a year, which generally means I'm going to be a little bit behind. I suppose that's the nature of the beast.

John Dyer Baizley

#59. The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality.

Mircea Eliade

#60. What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such - of what lies beyond the human and the made - and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.

Susan Sontag

#61. Our approach to reality, our sense of reality, cannot assume that the text of nature, the book of life, is a cryptogram concealing just a single meaning. Rather, it is an expanding riddle of a multiplicity of resonating images.

Peter Redgrove

#62. Our most cultural state is one of total certainty - which is the reason those of us who are most certain are those who are most out of touch with nature (i.e., reality).

Anthony Marais

#63. We have been impossible right from the beginning and we must continue to be impossible because we are raising a voice against suffering which has been considered to be the nature of life. It is our joy to be considered impossible - and it is our greater joy to make the impossible a living reality.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

#64. Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one's very heart - its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.

Joseph Conrad

#65. The nature of the cosmos is such that whatever vision you have about yourself and the world will become reality. As soon as you awaken to the power you have, you begin to flex the muscles of your courage.

Alberto Villoldo

#66. Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.

Charles Baudelaire

#67. We fail to reckon with the reality of human nature. By nature,we are egocentric. Our world revolves around us. None of us is totally altruistic.

Gary Chapman

#68. Our present picture of physical reality, particularly in relation to the nature of time, is due for a grand shake up

Roger Penrose

#69. One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to faithfully copy from nature.

Henry Fox Talbot

#70. Without stories, reality would destroy us. She says stories and myths and heroes challenge us to be worthy of a larger reality. To listen to the better angels of our nature. To be more than what we are.

Abigail Strom

#71. I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evenesce, to untangle the confusion of my past. Every instant disappears in a breath and immediately becomes the past; reality is ephemeral and changing, pure longing.

Isabel Allende

#72. Every great work of art should be considered like any work of nature. First of all from the point of view of its aesthetic reality and then not just from its development and the mastery of its creation but from the standpoint of what has moved and agitated its creator.

Amedeo Modigliani

#73. Bemused and besotted as we are, we still dimly know at heart that nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be resistant, should be itself.

C.S. Lewis

#74. If you want to know the reality of life, then you should travel. At first travel your country, after that start travelling the world. Travel to know your surroundings so that we can say that you are an aware person. Nature, people and culture are calling you, so travel.

Imran Khan

#75. We are humanity, the banner read. Wrong. We're pale reflections of it, weak shadows, distant echoes.

Rick Yancey

#76. It has sometimes been said that we find nowhere in nature an analogue of the difference between happens and is, on the one hand, and ought, on the other hand.

Wolfgang Kohler

#77. Silence is the language of nature and beauty where perception and feelings are the only reality.

Debasish Mridha

#78. The realities of nature surpass our most ambitious dreams.

Auguste Rodin

#79. By suicide I introduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will ... now I choose the direction of my thought and the direction of my faculties, my tendencies, my reality.

Antonin Artaud

#80. Night doesn't fall for my eyes
But my idea of the night is that it falls for my eyes.
Beyond my thinking and having any thoughts
The night falls concretely
And the shining of stars exists like it had weight.

Alberto Caeiro

#81. Everything changes. That's the universal nature of outer reality and inner experience. Therefore, there's no end to disturbed equilibria as long as you live.

Rick Hanson

#82. Metagapism is the belief that love is the ultimate reality, literally god and the one shared soul, and the source, nature and destiny of all.

John K. Brown

#83. So we have to recognize that species concepts are humanly produced categories which may or may not always work when compared with the reality of nature.

Chris Stringer

#84. God would be knowable as an infinite progression from ignorance into higher levels of knowledge and insight about the nature of self and reality.

Erik Lenderman

#85. In reality, we haven't escaped the gravity of life at all. We are still beholden to ecological laws, the same as any other life-form.

Janine Benyus

#86. I would call myself a Gnostic. Which means, I'm interested in pursuing and understanding the spiritual nature of things. A Gnostic is somebody seeking knowledge of that aspect of reality.

Robert Crumb

#87. Planning to play: that's what saving for retirement is today - and it is antithetical to the nature of play, fully within the definition of work, and blissfully ignorant of the reality of death.

John Thorn

#88. He gets away with it because he's strong.'
'This is the story of mankind.'
'I thought you were going to be a priest at one point.'
'Yes. But then I read the newspaper.

Christopher Buehlman

#89. Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality.

Oswald Spengler

#90. If in the place of God we write "Reality", "Nature", "Unknowable", or "Zero", it matters not one whit; the equation is just as obscure; for all we have done is to replace a by b, c, d, or e, not knowing what these letters mean. The symbol has changed, but what it symbolizes remains as inscrutable.

J. F. C. Fuller

#91. There are no ordinary people. The blur or everyday reality has created a world in which most of us have forgotten our unique and sacred existence ... it is [our] true self, once discovered, that enables us to understand more clearly the nature of our world, and our own existence.

Kim Chestney

#92. Technological change defines the horizon of our material world as it shapes the limiting conditions of what is possible and what is barely imaginable. It erodesassumptions about the nature of our reality, the "pattern" in which we dwell, and lays open new choices.

Shoshana Zuboff

#93. There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe: (1) the world as a unity dependent on humanity; (2) the world as a reality independent of the human factor.

Albert Einstein

#94. When we recognize that the seemingly object nature of reality is nothing different than the subject nature of mind, which is rigpa, it is called enlightenment.

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

#95. Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work.

Thom Mayne

#96. Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle of Reality; new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search.

Stephen King

#97. Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.

Robert M. Pirsig

#98. Because of the realities of human nature, perfect peace is achieved in two places only: in the grave and at the typewriter.

Richard M. Nixon

#99. I think it's very dangerous, the idea of celebrity - you have to be constantly controversial to maintain the status of celebrity. Reality TV is the death of entertainment - it's just mindless TV but popular because of its voyeuristic nature, and people are very voyeuristic.

David Suchet

#100. The reality of your own nature should determine your speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become tense and high-strung, slow down.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam