Barton Swaim Quotes

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

There are many levels of truth.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

When a party is in opposition, it opposes. That's its job. But when it comes to power, it must govern. Easy rhetoric is over, the press of reality becomes irresistible. By necessity, it adopts some of the policies it had once denounced. And a new national consensus is born.

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.

If people believe something is true, then it is even if it isn't.

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.

I am kind of an idealist but I became a DUP member because I believe politics should have a footing in harsh reality.

Because all the thought processes are limited, they are conditioned, and the thought does not touch directly with the reality, the truth; thoughts only grasps at the image of the truth.

Reason is the illusion of reality

Reality is something the human race doesn't handle very well.

That’s what the human brain is there for—to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there’s a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion.

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.

If the truth is told, things are just as bad as you yourself care to make them.

Without knowing the Knower, all the knowledge that one gathers cannot be valid.

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 ?

Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines.

All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.

Your mind doesn't know the difference between reality and fantasy. Your mindacts on what you feed it. Feed it good thoughts.

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.

Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.

When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if what we did wasn't really very admirable, we tend to forget that it ever happened. A normal human being's grasp on reality is very tenuous at best. Our imaginary lives are usually much nicer.

Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call “reality”. However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions?