Kenneth Burke Quotes

Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

Overall, looking at the stories [Black Mirror], almost every story we've ever done is concerned with authenticity or reality in some way.

A thing is a thing, not what is said of a thing

Sometimes touring can warp reality because you're never in one place long enough to get a feel for it. You don't interact with people long enough to know what real life is. That's why a lot of artists write songs about longing and missing people when they're on the road. I do my best to keep my mind open and I read a lot when I'm on tour, so I hope I have good things to write about. I'm constantly in the songwriting process.

All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is.

Words have to murder reality before they can hold it captive.

Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality.

Reality's its own thing. And I'm not really into reality that much. I'm into this cinematic stylized reality that can comment on reality. It's like the most beautiful parts of reality and the saddest parts, but it's none of this middle ground.

To the extent that language forces experiences into categories it is a screen between reality and the human being. In a word, we pay for its benefits... Therefore, while using language, as we must of necessity, we should be aware of its shortcomings.

Nothing is real.

Christianity taught us to see the eye of the lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.

All ego really is, is our opinions, which we take to be solid, real, and the absolute truth about how things are.

The Infinite is only a manner of speaking.

We don't need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality.

It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

The delusion that one's sexual pattern is The Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim's fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observing reality.

While growing up, I lived in my own fantasy world. I had kind of a rough childhood, so I created my own reality.

Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.

An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.