Reality

"But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith."

"I hope your heart feels better. I hope your mind is set right. I hope your love is connected to others, and you don't feel so lost and locked up. I hope everything is okay for you. And by okay, I mean greater than ever."

"Impending doom, it was a familiar sweater, we all wore it and as scratchy as it felt against our skin, we kept it on."

"Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions."

"Action is what makes hope a reality."

"Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions, inside the walls of a hospital... Doubt is like dye. Once is spreads into the fabric of excuses you've woven, you'll never get rid of the stain."

"It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces."

"Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities."

"Sometimes my fancy gets to floating inside me, threatening to carry me away like a leaf on a wind. Better to be a stone."

"Look, I'd sat through just as many Hollywood movies as the next person. I'd seen Sleepless in Seattle, Titanic, Twilight, whatever. I knew the myth. But i didn't believe it. I knew it was made up, I knew none of it was even close to reality."

"But do we know how to make love stay'I can't even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day."

"Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality."

"As a girl, she had come to believe in the ideal man -- the prince or knight of her childhood stories. In the real world, however, men like that simply didn't exist."

"It's a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack."

"Do You want to be Surrounded by Great People? There is an Appreciative Person, behind every Successful Person. Be that Person."

"Happiness is not the Achievement of Dreams. It is the Path to Dreams."

"Dialogue is about freeing human beings from the beliefs and attitudes that make human beings miserable."

"No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensible to the preservation and justification of existence in society. Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one — if, that is to say, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual impulses. And yet, as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems."

"Yes: I exist inside my body. I’m not carrying the sun and the moon in my pocket. I don’t want to conquer worlds because I slept badly,And I don’t want to eat the world for breakfast because I have a stomach. Indifferent?No: a son of the earth, who, if he jumps, it’s wrong,A moment in the air that’s not for us,And only happy when his feet hit the ground again,Pow! In reality where nothing’s missing!(6/20/1919)"

"I don't know whether it is beautiful or sad, that I find such blissful happiness within the confines of my own mind, more so than I do in the reality that surrounds me."