Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas Merton

A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.

Thomas Merton

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

Thomas Merton

Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself.

Thomas Merton

... Nothing resembles reality less than the photograph. Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the limitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the subject; and that is something else again.

Thomas Merton

In order to find God in ourselves, we must stop looking at ourselves, stop checking and verifying ourselves in the mirror of our own futility, and be content to be in Him and to do whatever He wills, according to our limitations, judging our acts not in the light of our own illusions, but in the light of His reality which is all around us in the things and people we live with.

Thomas Carlyle

Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction.

Tony DiSanto

After meeting the family, they really felt like a sitcom family, ... I thought it would be cool if we did a reality show, but told it with the visual language of a sitcom format.

Tony Dungy

Life is challenging. I wish I could tell you that you’ll always be on top of the mountain, but the reality is that there are days when nothing will go right, when not only will you not be on top, you may not even be able to figure out which way is up. Do yourself a favor, and don’t make it any harder than it has to be. In those moments, be careful how you speak to yourself; be careful how you think of yourself; be careful how you conduct yourself; be careful how you develop yourself.

Tom Waits

My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

Tom Savini

Film is a truly magical medium. You can create illusions of reality, make people think they've seen things that they really haven't - like blowing a guy's head off with a shotgun.

Tom Shales

Like sugar and, oh - let's say the most tabloidy and gossipy reality television programs - credit is, for millions, genuinely addictive.

Steven Spielberg

The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.

Steven Heller

When you’re living in the moment, you’re living in the moment; whatever that moment is, that’s your reality. Everything else is a myth.

Steve Olson

It won't be an issue. The area we're modifying will have more breakout space, but I don't think it exceeds 1,000 feet. It's space we already have in the building, the public lobby area, which, in reality, we use now for breakouts and breakfast.

Steve Blake

The significance and influence of just one BNP councillor is far in excess of the council powers such an elected figure can, in reality, command.

Stephen Hawking

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

Stephen Harper

Paul Martin talks eloquently about defending national sovereignty but the reality hasn't matched the rhetoric. When it comes to the United States, Mr. Martin says he calls them as he sees them, but when it comes to American passage through Canada, he doesn't actually see anything.

Stephen King

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

Stephen King

Things were going very fast now. Too fast to suit him. Fantasy and reality had merged.

Stanislav Grof

Philemon explained how Jung treated thoughts as though they were generated by himself, while for Philemon thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air. Jung concluded that Philemon taught him psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. This helped Jung to understand that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend.

Stanislav Grof

The experiences associated with death were seen as visits to important dimensions of reality that deserved to be experienced, studied, and carefully mapped.

Stanislav Grof

Whether or not LSD research and therapy will return to society, the discoveries that psychedelics made possible have revolutionary implications for our understanding of the psyche, human nature, and the nature of reality.

Stanislav Grof

Western science is approaching a paradigm shift of unprecedented proportions, one that will change our concepts of reality and of human nature, bridge the gap between ancient wisdom and modern science, and reconcile the differences between Eastern spirituality and Western pragmatism.

Stanislav Grof

Consciousness does not just passively reflect the objective material world; it plays an active role in creating reality itself.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Never turn your back on reality. It surrounds you.

Spider Robinson

The delusion that one's sexual pattern is The Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim's fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observing reality.

Sigmund Freud

The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to 'educate', and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.

Sigmund Freud

These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.

Sigmund Freud

The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.

Sigmund Freud

It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness - just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle -, if a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.

Sigmund Freud

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

Sigmund Freud

Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question.

Sigmund Freud

No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.