Reality

"Words, with their multiple meanings and nuances are like trees and oral communication like a forest. Trees are good for hiding, forest for losing the path. When one is trying to contemplate the horizon of illusion and reality, trees and forests can offer no help."

"The Sufi must be able to alternate his thought between the relative and the Absolute, the approximate and the Real."

"It is a harsh reality that some of the most important and respectable jobs which deserve high salaries might be better off with low salaries. A politician, or a minister, or a teacher is sure to be working sincerely and selflessly for the good of the people when through and through there is little monetary reward guaranteed. This is how the charlatans are weeded out of the field."

"I have no doubt that your acceptance of Christ coincided with some very positive changes in your life. Perhaps you now love other people in a way that you never imagined possible. You may even experience feelings of bliss while praying. I don’t wish to denigrate any of these experiences. I would point out, however, that billions of other human beings, in every time and place, have had similar experiences - but they had them while thinking about Krishna, or Allah, or the Buddha, while making art or music, or while contemplating the beauty of Nature. There is no question that it is possible for people to have profoundly transformative experiences. And there is no question that it is possible for them to misinterpret these experiences, and to further delude themselves about the nature of reality. You are, of course, right to believe that there is more to life than simply understanding the structure and contents of the universe. But this does not make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about its structure and contents any more respectable."

"Does that have to go in?” Lada asked.“What do you mean?” Wistala said, brought back to the dictation.“The battle. Betrayals. Incompetence, even cowardice. Boats falling, mud everywhere, blood running from balconies, carrion birds poking marrow from bones, dwarves hanging from bridges, burned corpses, but worst of all, no hero whose courage and skill is put to the ultimate test.”“They asked for a history, they shall have my history. If someone else will have the battle take place on a spring-green field with pennants at the lance points and songs sung over the honored dead, let them write it thus. This history is a story of death begetting death, and should end with carrion birds, for they are the only ones who come out the better at the end."

"Only if God IS ultimate reality, can he be our unconditional concern; only then can he be the object of surrender, obedience, and assent. Faith in anything which has only preliminary reality is idolatrous."

"When a lie makes a soft bed for everyone, may the truth lie low. God as commonly understood appears to be one such lie. God as non-existence is not everyone's cup of tea and He better remain so."

"We possess art lest we perish of the truth."

"Does it matter whether it was a dream or a reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?"

"People can't really sympathize with you properly when you've woken them up"

"Expectation creates the reality."

"He was a solitary figure in a vast landscape while she was a face in a nameless crowd."

"[Earl, on liking someone] Because, honestly, the rational part of me know for a rock-solid fact that I would never, ever get with Madison Hartner. But that was just the rational part of me. There's always a stupid irrational part of you, too, and you can't get rid of it. You can never completely kill off that tiny absurd spark of hope that this girl-against all odds, although she could date any guy at school, not to mention guys at college, and even though you look like the Oatmeal Monster and are a compulsive eater and suffer from constant congestion and say so many stupid things per day that it seems like a Stupid Things company is paying you to do it- this girl might like you."

"What saves us all are the deeds of fools as often as the acts of the wise."

"The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other - he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy - but it would be the only strictly correct method. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

"I'm convinced that everything I do will have a better outcome than the person who failed at it before me, because it’s the only reality I choose to accept."

"Let it rain on some days,Let yourself shiver on some cold nights, So when it's Spring you'll know why it was all worth going through."

"Only in cartoons and fairy tales and greeting cards do endings have glitter"

"When I was in Darkness,I could find my Fullness"

"But this was the first occasion I had come across someone for whom art was a means of avoiding reality rather than confronting it head on, an idea so strange to me that I didn't fully comprehend it at the time."