Reality

"Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights."

"To the person who believes this- as the western world did up until a few centuries ago- this physical, sensible world is good because it proceeds from a divine source. The artist usually knows this by instinct; his senses, which are used to penetrating the concrete, tell him so. When Conrad said that his aim as an artist was to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe, he was speaking with the novelist's surest instinct. The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality. This in no way hinders his perception of evil but rather sharpens it, for only when the natural world is seen as good does evil become intelligible as a destructive force and a necessary result of our freedom."

"(…) symbolism did not fall out of heaven or rise out of subterranean depths: it was elaborated like language, by the human reality…"

"It so happens that the primary though - as an act of thought - already has a form and is more easily transmitte to itself, or rather, to the very person who is thinking it; and that is why - because it has a form - it has a limited reach. Whereas the thought called "freedom" is free as an act of thought. It's so free that even to its thinker it seems to have no author."

"We tend to think that refusing to exalt Christ is staying true to our self-will and personal freedom when really we are condemning ourselves. Sure, we can pretend to stay true to ourselves, but if you want to talk about reality, all of that is completely trivial if this life is an island and He's the only pilot with a plane and a flight plan."

"But, said Alice, if the world has absolutely no sense, who's stopping us from inventing one?"

"Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."

"Dreams are another slice of reality, not different from where we are now—they just tell about it in a different way. They also can open up your reality. They don’t have the constraints of conscious logic."

"Our dreams can carry valuable information when we consciously choose to start listening to them."

"Because it is the nature of Dreams, and ONLY of Dreams, to define Reality. Destiny is bound to existence. Death is limited by what she will or will not accept."

"Reality was once a dream that took flight."

"Success belongs to those who take action to make their dreams a reality."

"What appears to be definite and precise does not belong to any acceptable reality. It is only the experiences, the queer previsions, the fleeting premonitions, that are real. Vague and insubstantial though they may appear to be, compared with anything else in the mists and shifting lights of Time theory, they loom up like mountains of iron ore."

"On the surface, there is no distinction between our experiences—some are vivid, others opaque; some are pleasant, others cause agony upon recollection—but there is no way of knowing which are dreams and which are reality."

"Sometimes a dream can appear more real than reality itself."

"Dreams have to be made real, not reality changed into dreams."

"FORKED BRANCHESWe grew up on the same street,You and me. We went to the same schools,Rode the same bus,Had the same friends,And even shared spaghetti With each other's families. And though our roots belong to The same tree,Our branches have grown In different directions. Our tree,Now resembles a thousand Other trees In a sea of a trillion Other trees With parallel destinies And similar dreams. You cannot envy the branch That grows bigger From the same seed,And you cannot Blame it on the sun's direction. But you still compare us,As if we're still those two Kids at the park Slurping down slushies and Eating ice cream. Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun (2010)"

"As a man thinketh so is he? The faith of a mustard seed? I planted these words in my thoughts, and still, mind wound up lost, between my dreams and reality."

"When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating; you even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought records.-- Vina, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage"), Star Trek, 1966"

"It’s when you start not just following a dream, but living it that your life seems no less than a heaven."