A Prison For Your Mind

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.  ~ Albert Einstein


It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality. ~ Rick Riordan


Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic. ~ Frank Herbert


Humankind cannot bear very much reality. ~ T.S. Eliot


Reality can be beaten with enough imagination. ~ Mark Twain


The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real. ~ Philip K. Dick


Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think. ~ Werner Heisenberg


The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head. ~ Kurt Vonnegut


Most of us go through each day looking for what we saw yesterday And, not surprisingly, that is what we find. ~ James A. Kitchens


The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. ~C.S. Lewis


Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it. ~ Niels Bohr


Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor. ~ Wallace Stevens


We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world. ~ Stephen R. Covey


It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us. ~ Carl Sagan


Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit. ~ William James


You can do everything right, strictly according to procedure, on the ocean, and it'll still kill you, but if you're a good navigator, at least you'll know where you were when you died. ~ Justin Scott


Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject. ~ Andre Breton


Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky


Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.  ~ Simone Weil

Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them. ~ Oscar Wilde


One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge. ~ Isaac Asimov


Lies have always been easier to invent than reality. ~ Marty Rubin


You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. ~ Morpheus