Neale Donald Walsch Quotes

Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

Words are a completely different form of expression. The word P-E-N-I-S is an entirely different form of communication than a photograph of the same thing. H

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation, but, we venture to say, they will find themselves very much enlightened during the process, and will even be doubtful whether the ideas as expressed in symbols had ever quite found their way out of the equations into their minds.

This was real. And it was me. I had lived that life, and I had died that death. I was staring at the very end of me.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.

A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first...A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images invoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed facts....Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images.

The woof and warp of all thought and all research is symbols, and the life of thought and science is the life inherent in symbols; so that it is wrong to say that a good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is the essence of it.

If you work from memory, you are most likely to put in your real feeling.

My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn't have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own.

The real wonders of life lie in the depths. Exploring the depths for truths is the real wonder which the child and the artist know: magic and power lie in truth.

The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty.

The way to choose happiness is to follow what is right and real and the truth for you.

What is reality if it isn't how we feel about things?

It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.

How do we know if our practice is a real practice? Only by one thing: more and more, we just see the wonder. What is the wonder? I don't know. We can't know such things through thinking. But we always know it when it's there.

It seems to me that life's circumstances, being ephemeral, teach us less about durable truths than the fictions based on those truths; and that the best lessons of delicacy and self-respect are to be found in novels where the feelings are so naturally portrayed that you fancy you are witnessing real life as you read.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

Those are facts. Are they the truth? No, for they do not tell you of the heart, and that is where truth lives.

Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all.

Panic is an incredibly catalyzing creative force. And almost out of sheer necessity, I found I had to talk about myself and my real life as it is effectively lived by me.