Democritus Quotes

How can the writer know reality if it is that which gets into him and sweeps him away, forever onto the sidelines.

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.

Things which we see are not by themselves what we see ... It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.

The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?

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.

An emotion as much tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

Whenever someone asks me about fantasy versus realism, I'm like, "I don't know, guys. Did we not all just descend into some underworld, watch strangers from our past kaleidoscope through us according to some pattern that is both illogical and has its own strange melting truth, and then wake up and have a Pop-Tart?" Why are we talking about fantasy and reality like they're opposed?

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

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

It is the bane and the balm of individual perception that 'objective' reality is seen through the filter of each person's temperament.

Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday. And I thought about the nature of reality and I got some deeper insights.

Why all these signs around us that make me doubt language and submerge me in meanings, drowning reality instead of extracting it from the imaginary?

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

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

Reality is a question of perspective.

Reality itself is too twisted.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans' insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.

Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

The mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.