Paul Celan Quotes

We are taught what reality is in all kinds of ways.

Reality is not simply there, it must be searched and won.

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.

In strict science, all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining forthe metaphysical foundation of this elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are.

A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.

While men believe themselves to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in truth.

Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality ?

As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.

A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible to us.

Why ask for truth," Ser Barristan said softly, "if you close your ears to it?

It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension; whenit, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.

I think the reality is important anyway.

What reality was ever made by realists?

Anyone who seeks truth seeks God, whether or not he realizes it.

How our story has been divided up among the truth-telling professions! Religion, philosophy, history, poetry, compete with each other for our ears; and science competes with all together. And for each we have a different set of ears. But, though we hear much, what we are told is as nothing: none of it gives us ourselves, rather each story-kind steals us to make its reality of us.

The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.

What is life without incompatible realities?

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?