Gary Zukav Quotes

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

Rumi, who is one of the greatest Persian poets, said that the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

What a thing is and what it means are not separate, the former being physical and the latter mental as we are accustomed to believe.

The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

We think that - as kids, you know - that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place, but that, as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks.

The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.

If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?

We're not in the physical world. The physical world is in us. We create the physical world when we perceive it, when we observe it. And also we create this experience in our imagination. And when I say "we," I don't mean the physical body or the brain, but a deeper domain of consciousness which conceives, governs, constructs and actually becomes everything that we call physical reality.

The information is there, you may not perceive it, but it does affect the lower orders. There are places where it just peaks out. It is like the color spectrum, it just simply goes beyond where you can perceive it any more but it is still going on. If you decide that the invisible continuation of the color spectrum is important to your sense of what reality is about, then you would want to extend it. Extend it as far as you could, as an aesthetic.

Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.

Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity).

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

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.

It is not possible to provide evidence of life after death to the five senses anymore than it is possible to provide the five senses with evidence of non-physical reality. It cannot be done. The five senses; sight,hearing, taste and smell together form a single sensory system whose object of detection is physical reality. This cannot detect non-physical reality. Humankind is beginning to be able to access data the 5 senses cannot provide.

...they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.

The world that you can go walk outside and walk around the block. That's reality. The reality that's being talked about is something else entirely.

Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions have given them? Give me your hat.

Bodies are real entities. Surfaces and lines are but fictitious entities. A surface without depth, a line without thickness, was never seen by any man; no; nor can any conception be seriously formed of its existence.

Metaphysical world.- It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.

It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself.

Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes (sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the 'elements' as the transient appearance, he does not realise that all 'bodies' are only mental symbols for element-complexes (sensation-complexes).

For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos. What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?