Real Life Quotes - Page 21

• In the history of humanity there are no civilizations or cultures which fail to manifest, in one or a thousand ways, this need for an absolute that is called heaven, freedom, a miracle, a lost paradise to be regained, peace, the going beyond History... There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.... Humanity has always had a nostalgia for the freedom that is only beauty, that is only real; life, plenitude, light.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Philosophy, Real, Thinking

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• Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick-of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.

  John Irving

  Real, Television, Phases

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• The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.

  Carl Schmitt

  Real, Break Through, Interesting

  Carl Schmitt (2010). “Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty”, p.15, University of Chicago Press

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• Cynicism is what passes for insight when courage is lacking

  Anita Roddick

  Real, Cynicism, Insight

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• Everyone has the right to doubt everything as often as he pleases and the duty to do it at least once. No way of looking at things is too sacred to be reconsidered. No way of doing things is beyond improvement.

  Edward de Bono

  Real, Doubt, Sacred

  Edward De Bono (1971). “The use of lateral thinking”

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• If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.

  Terry Pratchett

  Real, Cynical, Fantasy

  Terry Pratchett (2016). “Seriously Funny: The Endlessly Quotable Terry Pratchett”, p.9, Random House

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• The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situations. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help is, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

  Aldous Huxley

  Real, Memorable, Omission

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• In real life as in grand opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Real, Opera, Hopeless

  Kurt Vonnegut (2011). “Timequake”, p.111, Random House

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• You know what truth is? [...] It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, "Yeah, yeah - ain't it the truth?

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Crazy, Real, Believe

  FaceBook post by Kurt Vonnegut from May 25, 2016

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• Beliefs are the eyelids of the mind.

  David Zindell

  Real, Mind, Belief

  David Zindell (2017). “The Broken God”, p.45, HarperCollins UK

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• Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

  Azar Nafisi

  Real, Trying, Fiction

  Azar Nafisi (2003). “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, p.3, Random House

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• She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, "There you go." -- Willing

  Lorrie Moore

  Real, Tools, Gravy

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• Hobbes: Jump! Jump! Jump! I win! Calvin: You win? Aaugghh! You won last time! I hate it when you win! Aarrggh! Mff! Gnnk! I hate this game! I hate the whole world! Aghhh! What a stupid game! You must have cheated! You must have used some sneaky, underhanded mindmeld to make me lose! I hate you! I didn't want to play this idiotic game in the first place! I knew you'd cheat! I knew you'd win! Oh! Oh! Aarg! [Calvin runs in circles around Hobbes screaming "Aaaaaaaaaaaa", then falls over.] Hobbes: Look, it's just a game. Calvin: I know! You should see me when I lose in real life!

  Bill Watterson

  Running, Real, Stupid

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• What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words -- 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

  Mark Twain

  Real, Book, Men

  Autobiography vol. 1 (1924)

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• I had no night terrors. Maybe when your real life becomes the terror, there's just nothing left to dream about

  Edward Bloor

  Dream, Real, Night

  Edward Bloor (2007). “Taken”, p.170, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• If people were in the habit of refering to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang,' it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Kings, Real, Long

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2014). “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien”, p.63, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We walk the brink of racial suicide because we were smart enough to make atomic bombs and stupid enough to use them.

  David Zindell

  Suicide, Real, Smart

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• The system will always be defended by those countless people who have enough intellect to defend but not quite enough to innovate.

  Edward de Bono

  Real, People, Enough

  Edward de Bono (2017). “I Am Right, You Are Wrong”, p.235, Penguin UK

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• (...) being right all the time acquires a huge importance in education, and there is this terror of being wrong. The ego is so tied to being right that later on in life you are reluctant to accept that you are ever wrong, because you are defending not the idea but your self-esteem. (...) this terror of being wrong means that people have enormous difficulties in changing ideas.

  Edward de Bono

  Real, Self Esteem, Mean

  Edward De Bono (1972). “PO: a device for successful thinking”

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• Life is serious but art is fun!

  John Irving

  Life, Art, Fun

  John Irving (1986). “The Hotel New Hampshire”

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• Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishenss or indifference. Woodrew knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not.

  John le Carre

  Mistake, Real, Grief

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• you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.

  Tim O'Brien

  Real, War, Dirty

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.66, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• God is obviouslt God, and Heaven obviously exsists, and every word spoken here on earth turns heads up there.

  Ted Dekker

  Real, Heaven, Earth

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• Real life is sometimes boring, rarely conclusive and boy, does the dialogue need work.

  Sarah Rees Brennan

  Real, Boys, Doe

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• Now I'd like someone to tell me there is no drama in real life!

  Alexandre Dumas

  Real, Drama, No Drama

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