Reality

"some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems."

"And since today’s all there is for now, that’s everything. Who knows if I’ll be dead the day after tomorrow?If I’m dead the day after tomorrow, the thunderstorm day after tomorrow Will be another thunderstorm than if I hadn’t died. Of course I know thunderstorms don’t fall because I see them,But if I weren’t in the world,The world would be different —There would be me the less —And the thunderstorm would fall on a different world and would be another thunderstorm. No matter what happens, what’s falling is what’ll be falling when it falls.(7/10/1930)"

"Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination."

"In the underworld, reality itself has elastic properties and is capable of being stretched into different definitionsof the truth."

"A bitter reality of truth can be wisely told in a sweet tale of lullaby."

"It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us."

"We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true."

"I'm one of my sensations."

"The truth is, it's really only okay to be yourself if that self is within an accepted range of 'normal'."

"I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read."

"When two things occur successively we call them cause and effect if we believe one event made the other one happen. If we think one event is the response to the other, we call it a reaction. If we feel that the two incidents are not related, we call it a mere coincidence. If we think someone deserved what happened, we call it retribution or reward, depending on whether the event was negative or positive for the recipient. If we cannot find a reason for the two events' occurring simultaneously or in close proximity, we call it an accident. Therefore, how we explain coincidences depends on how we see the world. Is everything connected, so that events create resonances like ripples across a net? Or do things merely co-occur and we give meaning to these co-occurrences based on our belief system? Lieh-tzu's answer: It's all in how you think."

"Never say that you can't do something, or that something seems impossible, or that something can't be done, no matter how discouraging or harrowing it may be; human beings are limited only by what we allow ourselves to be limited by: our own minds. We are each the masters of our own reality; when we become self-aware to this: absolutely anything in the world is possible. Master yourself, and become king of the world around you. Let no odds, chastisement, exile, doubt, fear, or ANY mental virii prevent you from accomplishing your dreams. Never be a victim of life; be it's conqueror."

"I encounter one example after another of how relative truth is."

"Flattery does not encourage the perfect flow of love in the vein of your relationship. Be genuine and speak out what you feel for each other without hiding the painful truth."

"But I still feel like I lost. We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in the sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet. probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you'll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there's still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. You will remember having conversations with this person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trysts with this person that never technically occurred. This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real-but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they're often just the person you happen to meet first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else."

"We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine, and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management?"

"Do you really believe in destiny" "How can I not believe in destiny, when there is no difference between my memories and my dreams at night? There's no difference between their reality. And if I dream something first, I remember it later when I am actually walking in the place or looking at the person I first dreamed of. Days later. Or years later. Destiny~ she walks with me."

"Where we fall are the stepping-stones for our journey."

"Man keeps looking for a truth that fits his reality. Given our reality, the truth doesn't fit."

"At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism. Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?"