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Reality Quotes

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Reality Quotes

“We all know that each generation has its own test, the contemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequately judge of its own moral achievements, and that it may not legitimately use a previous and less vigorous test. The advanced test must indeed include that which has already been attained; but if it includes no more, we shall fail to go forward, thinking complacently that we have "arrived" when in reality we have not yet started.”

IfsThinkingKnowsMayUseRealityMoralProgressFailingGenerationsJudgingAchievementStandardsTestsCurrentsVigorousForward Thinking
Book:Democracy and Social Ethics
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“What has here happened is that the instinct of cruelty, which has turned inwards, has become self-torture, and all man's animal instincts have been reinterpreted as guilt towards God. Every Nay man utters to his nature, to his real being, he flings out as a Yea, an affirmation of reality applied to God's sanctity”

MenHas BeensRealSelfRealityAnimalHappenedGuiltInstinctCrueltyTortureAffirmationSanctityFlingAnimal Instinct
Book:Friedrich Nietzsche (English Edition)
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“The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.”

RealityOrderLanguageHeardConceptsInjusticeMetaphysicsMetaphysicalPowerlessBetrayedDeprivedNeutralityImpartiality
Book:Dialectic of Enlightenment
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“The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or antipathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees - an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physicals reality.”

WorldHumansWholeRealityFormSufferingOrderIndividualCausesObjectsDegreesDetailsVariousTreatedDisplayCanvasRepresentationVacuumsHuman RelationsHuman RelationshipsEliminationAlterationsEnrichment
Book:Self-Portrait in Words: Collected Writings and Statements, 1903-1950
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“In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch. Reality to us is thinghood , consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact.”

MatterFactsRealityEyeSpaceResultsFailingFingersSensesSubstancePerceiveDaily LifeBlindnessMatter Of FactSpelling
Book:Insecurity of Freedom
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“I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.”

WorldMindBelieveHandsRealityFilmLiteratureI BelieveSpaceExampleMovementScenePainterFantasticLandscapeRealmsEncountersRegionsRealisticSpheresImaginaryInner WorldOuter WorldsSurrealist
Author:J. G. Ballard
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“Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful.”

WorldWayMindHumansArtRealityActionMovingSexRichCarEventsArt IsOriginalsMeaningfulThanksMake SenseSignificanceHuman MindPrincipalCrashRugbyRemakesVirtual RealityEditedSlow MotionReplayCar Crash
Author:J. G. Ballard
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“I've never felt Truth was Beauty. Never. I've always felt that people can't take too much reality. I like being in Ingmar Bergman's world. Or in Louis Armstrong's world. Or in the world of the New York Knicks. Because it's not this world. You spend your whole life searching for a way out. You just get an overdose of reality, you know, and it's a terrible thing. I'm always fighting against reality.”

PeopleKnowsWorldWayWholeRealityFightingFeltToo MuchNew YorkThis WorldTerribleWhole LifeTerrible ThingsArmstrongOverdoseBergmanKnicksAlways Fighting
Author:Woody Allen
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“When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.”

IfsRealityBeliefLostCausesDivineAbsenceAttachmentSparksNew ThingsCloaksBelief In GodOld ThingsIncredulity
Book:In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)
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“We say that we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that almost always we are ourselves animals therein, deprived of that reasoning power which projects upon things the light of certainty; on the contrary we bring to bear on the spectacle of life only a dubious vision, extinguished anew every moment by oblivion, the former reality fading before that which follows it as one projection of a magic lantern fades before the next as we change the slide.”

MomentsDreamRealityLightNextForgetAnimalVisionMagicBearsProjectsContraryCertaintyFormerReasoningFadesOur DreamsOblivionDeprivedProjectionSlidesFadingDubiousLanterns
Book:Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's way. Within a budding grove
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“The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams.”

ShouldRealReasonDreamRealityImaginationMemoriesDestroyedReason WhyNo ReasonConformOur DreamsArbitraryOur MemoriesElusiveSelected
Book:In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)
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“Certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.”

RealityCertainRolesEasierForgottenFavouriteTestimony
Book:In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)
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“Let but a single flash of reality -- the glimpse of a woman from afar or from behind -- enable us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes, and we imagine that we have recognised it, our hearts beat, and we will always remain half-persuaded that it was She, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake.”

IfsHeartRealityEyeBehindsMistakeHalfImagineProjectsBeatsManageRealisingImagine ThatFlashGlimpseAfarHeart Beat
Book:In Search of Lost Time: Within a budding grove
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“All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.”

PeopleRealityPoliticalPoliticsSidesCommunityPartyMoralEnemyGenerationsHuman NatureMovementBecomingEthicsAbsolutesStrategyUnityTerrorConvictionIdeologyTeaVotingDisagreeFree SpeechSuperiorityPolitical PartiesFlexibilityCivilityDisobedienceTea PartyCivil DisobedienceHereticPartisanshipThird PartiesPolitical MovementsOversimplificationMoral Superiority
Author:Doris Lessing
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“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 indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society.”

GivingHumansMeanRealityValuesIndividualEnjoyCommunityWorkExistencePossibilityAmountOffersRelationConnectedTechniqueSecureAggressivePortionsJustificationIndispensablePreservationEmphasisComponentsEroticNarcissisticHuman RelationsProfessional Work
Book:The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud
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“I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities.”

PeopleStatesRealityUnitedUnited StatesExampleResponsibleBillsConfusionSymbolsBurningManifestationTerritoryFlagsPenaltiesAmazedSevereImposingCongressmanAmerican Flag
Author:Alan Watts
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