Tao Te Ching
Reality
We all tend to believe that, “Of course, I know what reality is!” But how do we explain the radically different interpretations? Do we believe we know and no one else does? Although we may not consciously believe this, most of our actions reflect a view that we do know. Knowing reality merges closely with that universal dictum, “Know Yourself.” And indeed, how can we even begin to know ourselves if we don’t know reality. Or maybe better to say, how can we begin to know reality until we know ourselves? Copernicus described one of the impediments along this road of discovery when he said, “to know that we do not know what we do not know is rare and true knowledge.” Other powerful impediments include belief and opinion. To the extent we “know” or believe, we only see that and become blinded to what is. So from this point of view, we can only know reality directly, unfiltered by any religious, philosophical, political, or scientific sage, guru, or professor.
Quotes (99)
“The surest test if a man be sane is if he accepts life whole, as it is.”
“Those who embrace reality and exercise true sincerity move the spirits of heaven and earth... Even if they don't say a single word, nevertheless all the people in the world evolve along with them.”
“The king only loves the words, he cannot make use of the reality.”
“reality is unborn and imperishable, whole, unique, immovable and without end it was not in the past, not yet shall it be, since it now is, altogether, one and continuous.”
“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance; for this is the true reality.”
“Is our ‘reality’ not as permanent as we think but just a fleeting thought, a dream?”
“Events have no more reality than clouds swirling through the sky. How can they harm or profit us in any way?”
“When a person follows the way of the world or the way of tradition and believes in words instead of the sense, the rites instead of the experience; knowledge of Reality cannot arise.”
“If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both.”
“If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.”
“As a cloud blocks the light of the sun, I was blocked from the light of reality by my concepts of self and other.”
“Plow the field of your conditioned being and harvest an endless crop of pure joy, the delight in a continuous stream of reality.”
“People either neglect the root and focus on the branches or neglect the reality of the branches and focus only on realization.”
“If where you stand is reality, then your actions have power... it is there, pure and naked and full of life.”
“Practice true reality not possessed by emotions but bright and penetrating like moonlight glittering down on mountain streams.”
“Desiring external things harms our bodies. Sages… choose internal reality over external illusion.”
“Like water in a mirage, a dream, an echo, a phantom emanation, a reflection, a castle in the air, or a hallucination; all things are clearly apparent yet to not truly exist”
“If you grasp the leftovers, you cannot hold to reality and will end up cut off from the source.”
“The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.”
“To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”
“When the mind is given free rein in the realm of thought, it no longer knows what is real.”
“Happiness and suffering... empty catchwords, book covers without a book, for there is not such thing in reality.”
“Reality is one substance with everywhere two (among many) attributes or aspects—material extension and spaceless truth. We are among those parts of reality that can perceive”
“All Discord, Harmony, not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good:
And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, 'Whatever IS, is RIGHT.'”
“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.”
“The stupider one is, the closer to reality. Intelligence is a knave, it wriggles and hides but stupidity is honest and straight-forward.”
“It is possible that our millions of suns make up altogether but a spec in a minute insect in a world vast beyond our ability to imagine which is in some other world no more than a speck of dust.”
“Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show us a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins our journey of awakening.”
“What we call reality is a certain rapport between our sensations and the memories that encircle us at the same moment.”
“It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
“Words butter no parsnips; nevertheless, this futile procedure is repeated ad infinitum... the reality of life is covered up by so-called clear concepts. Experience is striped of its substance, and instead mere names are substituted, which are henceforth put in the place of reality.”
“Many a truth has lain unnoticed for a long time, ignored simply because no one perceived its potential for becoming reality.”
“The spirit of philosophy is one of free inquiry. It suspects all authority. Its function is to trace the uncritical assumptions of human thought to their hiding places, and in this pursuit it may finally end in denial or a frank admission of the incapacity of pure reason to reach the ultimate reality.”
“The standpoint of the man who relies on religious experience for capturing Reality must always remain individual and incommunicable.”
“There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.”
“If you become objective to yourself you can see other people objectively, but not before, because before that it will all be colored by your own views, attitudes, tastes, by what you like and what you dislike”
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
“Reality does not exist independent of man, completed and ready; it comes about with man's collaboration, and is proportionate to man's worth.”
“Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.”
“The basic reality in life is not politics, nor industry, but human relationships—the associations of a man with a woman... the family is greater than the State, devotion and despair sink deeper into the heart than economic strife, in the end our happiness lies not in possessions, place, or power, but in the gift and return of love.”
“...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.”
“No amount of theorizing can tell us as much about divine Reality as can be directly apprehended by a mind in a state of detachment, charity and humility.”
“The reality of time is identified with the reality of the wholeness of wholes. The quality of the moment when a group becomes an operative whole determines the quality of the wholeness... and the span of wholeness cannot be isolated from the essence of the whole.
”
“his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.. For awhile these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.”
“The Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna was probably the first to express a similar idea—reality is in itself a relative term which depend on the standpoint of an observer—and base his whole philosophy on it which led to the foundation of Mahayana, the Great Way, which became the main religion of China and was amalgamated with Taoism in the creation of Ch'an or Zen (the meditative school of Buddhism).”
“The absolute reality is inconceivable and inexpressible and the more a master speaks of it, the more he will stray from it. For this reason, Yun Men said that the old masters were talking nonsense and asked the monk if they had stopped 'talking in their sleep'.”
“Some got stuck in magic, some in religion, some in science, some in metaphysics or other logical speculations. Only very few remained open to all facets of reality without getting caught in the nets of speculation and wishful thinking.”
“We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real... Reality is not always probable, or likely.”
“All of our decisions about what is and is not are just decisions made in accordance with how it appears to our mind; they have no other basis whatsoever.”
“That is the 'eye of wisdom' - to appreciate things and people 'as they are' and live our lives fully in the universe that is 'as it is.'”
“For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception - his epistemological premises - he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be.”
“For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception—his epistemological premises—he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be.”
“Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.”
“Buddhism is neither pessimistic nor optimistic. If anything at all, it is realistic, for it takes a realistic view of life and the world. It looks at things objectively. It does not falsely lull you into living in a fool's paradise, nor does it frighten and agonize you with all kinds of imaginary fears and sins. It tells you exactly and objectively what you are and what the world around you is, and shows you the way to perfect freedom, peace, tranquility and happiness.”
“Where the sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence.”
“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”
“When unreality meets reality, which is experiencing, then slowly the unreality just fades away. You begin to recognize what's underneath the surface, what's underneath even that core belief.”
“In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.”
“This verse celebrates the relativity of reality, thereby aligning itself with modern science, especially Einstein's theory of relativity.”
“Don't be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
”
“We eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness.”
“The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality… the moment of vision before intellectualization”
“Every kind of ignorance in the world all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles. We believe what we see and then we believe our interpretation of it, we don't even know we are making an interpretation most of the time. We think this is reality.”
“Impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don't struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality.”
“Reality is a harry beast... How connected you are with reality depends somewhat on your degree of sanity, but at the same time your disconnection with reality also comes through, and a message will come through at once, very clearly, strongly and properly.”
“I think it’s a question of being in contact with reality, then we don’t have to crank up something else.”
“The shadows of dreams are reality. Dreams produce reality; reality produces dreams.”
“The scene seemed somehow divorced from reality, although reality, he knew, could at times be terribly unreal.”
“In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Boundaries don't exist so there are hardly ever any collisions. Reality is different. Reality bites.”
“Reality was not only capable of taking part in a dialogue — intelligible and articulate — it was also persuadable.”
“Our notion of reality is at variance with actual reality because we are surrounded by clichéd depictions of the world”
“You’re squeezing a size -eighteen reality into a size-eleven supposition.”
“Let it be makes it possible to see that our true nature is free from problems, distress, and suffering—and that it always has been... But this is not freedom from distress and anxiety. It is freedom that can be experience with stress and anxiety. We are liberated from suffering by correctly perceiving reality.”
“resistance to change puts us at odds with reality, and this creates never-ceasing dissatisfaction”
“We humans have conquered the world thanks to our ability to create and believe fictional stories. We are therefore particularly bad at knowing the difference between fiction and reality.”
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