C. S. Lewis Quotes

There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.

To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

As long as we accept alien definitions of reality and internalize them, we remain powerless. If we can emerge with such new definitions and not be so thoroughly intimidated by the existing paradigm, we can begin to collect on our destiny.

We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls.

The convenience of timekeeping is greatly overrated; and the people who practice it so faithfully that they lose the capacity for appreciating the fixed and the static and the spatially related experiences cut themselves off from a good part of reality.

If life were a movie, physical reality would be the entire DVD: Future and past frames exist just as much as the present one.

...knowledge of material reality is the knowledge of death.

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 ?

I love the fact that the present is the only real reality we have.

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

You can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past. They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don't know how it's going to come out. They weren't just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can't understand them if you don't understand how they perceived reality.

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.

There is neither Past nor Future. There is only the Present.

If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

Truth, which is permanent, eludes the historian of events. Truth transcends history.

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.

Speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave objects of the world their shape.

We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.

Opinion is a fitting thing but truth outlasts the sun - if then we cannot own them both, possess the oldest one.