Famous Quotes & Sayings

Marcel Proust

Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into account.

Marcel Proust

The soldier is convinced that a certain indefinitely extendable time period is accorded him before he is killed, the burglar before he is caught, men in general, before they must die. That is the amulet which preserves individuals — and sometimes populations — not from danger, but from the fear of danger, in reality from the belief in danger, which in some cases allows them to brave it without being brave. Such a confidence, just as unfounded, supports the lover who counts on a reconciliation, a letter.

Marcel Proust

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

Marcel Proust

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

Marcel Proust

Nous sommes tous oblige s, pour rendre la re alite supportable, d'entretenir en nous quelques petites folies. We must all indulge in a few follies if we are to make reality bearable.

Marcel Proust

Certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.

Marcel Proust

Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.

Marcel Proust

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

Marcel Proust

When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.

Marcel Proust

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

Joseph Beuys

Truth must be found in reality, not systems.

Jose Saramago

People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

The masses think that is is easy to flee from reality, when it is the most difficult thing in the world.

Jorge Garcia

Mixing humour and harsh reality is a very human behaviour, it's the way people stay sane in their daily lives.

Jorge Luis Borges

Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker.

Jorge Luis Borges

Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but ... hypotheses may not.

Jorge Luis Borges

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

Jorge Luis Borges

Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.

Jorge Luis Borges

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

Jorge Luis Borges

Reality favors symmetry.

Jones Very

Macbeth is contending with the realities of this world, Hamlet with those of the next.

Joni Mitchell

A little lawyer on the tube, he said, its so easy now, anyone can sue.

Joni Mitchell

Heaven's full of astronauts and the Lord's on death row.

Jonathan Toews

You become what you think about and focus on the most. See yourself attracting the things you want to accomplish. Thoughts and desires in your mind can become a reality.

Kevin Smith

This is not an industry in which you curl up in a ball and shy away from the realities. It's a time to scream to the clouds that we're here and we've got great values and great prices. What better time to do that than the Super Bowl?

Kathy Reichs

Though Anne was born in Alabama and schooled in Mississippi, she had traveled North, and, like many Southerners, gained a theoretical understanding of the concept of cold. But the mind is an overprotective parent. What it doesn't care for, it hides. Like many inhabiting the subtropics, Anne had repressed the reality of subzero mercury.

Joanne Froggatt

I like 'X Factor' as much as the next person, but I do get overwhelmed with the amount of reality TV. It's such cheap programming and such a load of rubbish, most of it.

Joaquin Phoenix

Together, we can make a U.S. Department of Peace into a reality, and leave a gift of peace for generations to come.

Jo Brand

People are so different in reality from the picture created of them on TV. So it's all a creation; everything is made up.

John C. Malone

The curse of the cable industry over all these years as an operating reality is that every year the debt goes up (and) all the money generated gets reinvested, and then some.

John C. Calhoun

[The taxing power of the state] divides the community into two great classes: one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the taxes and, of course, bear exclusively the burden of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds through disbursements,and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers. But the effect of this is to place them in antagonistic relations in reference to the fiscal action of the government and the entire course of policy therewith connected.

John C. Maxwell

When you are influential and highly respected, people tend to tell you what you want to hear, not what you need to hear. They are seeking your approval, or they flatter you. Unfortunately, this creates a gap between what you hear and reality. If you find yourself in that situation, you will need to work extra hard to get the people close to you to speak honestly into your life. And you will have to become highly intentional in observing and listening.

James Surowiecki

The fact that industries wax and wane is a reality of any economic system that wants to remain dynamic and responsive to people's changing tastes.