“Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.”
“Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.”
“However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.”
“I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.”
“Social counterpoints can be a shrieking reality. But life may nevertheless become a colorful canvas with an array of opportunities, allowing us to escape from the suffocation of our enclosure if we hold ourselves receptive to the healing power of the daily little marvels and stay aware of the vivifying unexpectedness of the ‘moment’. (‘ Côté cour…Côté jardin )”
“As we are whiling away days of idleness, time may flow rashly through the screen of our thoughts and veil the relevance of individual fragments in our story. The clock of reality can arrest us, though, and compel us to confront the demands of the truth. ( Non mais, t as vu l heure ! )”
“Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.”
“Detik itu juga aku merasa seolah-olah jantungku diremas. Ah. Inilah sebabnya mengapa aku menyukai film dokumenter. Film dokumenter membuat aku sadar bahawa hidup ini nyata, bahwa dunia yang kutinggali ini tidak sempurna.”
“it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright”
“I was beginning to see the danger in adhering to a single narrative, hewing to a story. The peril wasn t only in getting it wrong. It was a kind of calcification, a narrowing, a perversion of reality that hardened and stilled the spirit.”
“Reality is in the hand of the masturbator.”
“When all you want to do is wake up from a dream that you thought was reality.”
“Reality speaks itself; it needs nothing for that.”
“I know now that the past tense is a cruel deception. Anything real is now and forever engraved on our bodies.”
“The mass media first convinced us that the imaginary was real, and now they are convincing us that the real is imaginary; and the more reality the TV screen shows us, the more cinematic our everyday world becomes. Until, as certain philosophers have insisted, we will think that we are alone in the world, and that everything else is the film that God or some evil spirit is projecting before our eyes.”
“Honestly...welcome to the world the rest of us live in, where we re trying our best and still end up just mostly OK, and somehow manage to get up in the morning in spite of that.”
“Those raised in dharma naturally tend to look for a common element among apparently different things, to discover the reality below the appearances and to appreciate relationships among seemingly unrelated phenomena.”