Actuality Quotes - Page 4

• We can shed some light on the possibility of the fall, but the transition to the actuality of it remains shrouded in darkness. Scripture makes not so much a single effort to render this transition understandable

  Herman Bavinck

  Fall, Light, Effort

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• There are some men who are counted great because they represent the actuality of their own age, and mirror it as it is. Such an one was Voltaire, of whom it was epigrammatically said: "he expressed everybody's thoughts better than anyone." But there are other men who attain greatness because they embody the potentiality of their own day and magically reflect the future. They express the thoughts which will be everybody's two or three centuries after them. Such as one was Descartes.

  Thomas Huxley

  Science, Greatness, Men

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• The unwearable of high heels is self-evidently all around us, coming to a head at the average wedding reception, a uniformly high-heeled occasion. In our minds, we see it as a serene and elegant gathering of women in their finest, one of the big chances of the year to pretend you're at the Oscars, in your stilettos. In actuality of course, ... there are women staggering around in the unaccustomed vertical, foot-flesh spilling over tight, unkind satin.

  Caitlin Moran

  Fashion, Feet, Clothes

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• Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.

  Lionel Trilling

  Strong, Emotional, Ideas

  Lionel Trilling (2012). “The Liberal Imagination”, p.286, New York Review of Books

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• Power is what they want, not candy-power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuality to their thought; which, to a clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the universe exists, and all its resources might be well applied.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Feet, Giving

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.365

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• There is only the actuality of what happens in life. The rest is just a story, no matter who's telling it.

  Gary Crowley

  Life, Stories, Matter

  Gary Crowley (2009). “Pass the Jelly: Tales of Ordinary Enlightenment : a Memoir”, p.37, Sentient Publications

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• Surely the memory of an event cannot pass for the event itself. Nor can the anticipation. There is something exceptional, unique, about the present event, which the previous, or the coming do not have. There is livingness about it, an actuality; it stands out as if illumined. There is the "stamp of reality" on the actual, which the past and future do not have.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Inspirational, Memories, Unique

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• This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Powerful, Block

  Thomas Merton (1968). “Zen and the Birds of Appetite”, p.109, New Directions Publishing

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• During the reign of Rameses III (the Twentieth Dynasty) Egypt saw a flowering of its civilization and the harp became the royal instrument of priests and kings. Often times they had as many as 21 strings. Under the manipulation "the Minstrels of the Gods" the music was of rare potency. "Musical Medicine" was an actuality. Healing, along with numerous so-called "supernatural feats" was attributed to this art.

  Corinne Heline

  Art, Kings, Inspiration

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• The liberals have not softened their view of actuality to make themselves live closer to the dream, but instead sharpen their perceptions and fight to make the dream actuality.

  Margaret Mead

  Dream, Fighting, Views

  Margaret Mead (1975). “Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world”, William Morrow & Co

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• All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.

  Bell Hooks

  Believe, Commitment, Expression

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• No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost suddenly appearing in the room wearing familiar perfume and boots.

  Lorrie Moore

  Boots, Matter, Rooms

  FaceBook post by Lorrie Moore from Sep 11, 2014

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• Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality.

  Colin Wilson

  Simple, Perception, World

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• Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topography, Alternatives, World

  "Ask an Art Critic: Jerry Saltz Answers Your Questions About George Condo, Online Art Fairs, and What Abstraction Really Is" by Jerry Saltz, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 24, 2011.

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• The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality of whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered to them.

  C. S. Lewis

  Believe, Reality, Two

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• So I suppose I do not know how he really looked, and, in fact, I suppose I shall never know, now, for he was plainly an object created in the mode of fantasy. His image was already present somewhere in my head and I was seeking to discover it in actuality, looking at every face I met in case it was the right face - that is, the face which corresponded to my notion of the unseen face of the one I should love, a face created parthenogeneticallyby the rage to love which consumed me.

  Angela Carter

  Unseen, Faces, Facts

  Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

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• How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn't it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Choices, Rules And Regulations, World

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• What we believe as human nature in actuality is human habit.

  Jewel

  Nature, Believe, Habit

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• If that one is already a great artist, who knows how to educe from a small piece of wood the face of a king or of a queen, an ant or a camel, how great then is the mastery which can form as actuality everything which is in all potentiality? Therefore, God, who is able to produce from the most minute piece of matter the similitude of all forms which can be in this world and in infinitely many worlds, is of admirable subtlety.

  Nicholas of Cusa

  Kings, Queens, Artist

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• People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Light, People, Finite

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1904). “The Logic of Hegel”

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• In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Dream, Reality, Brain

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2014). “The 10 Greatest Books of All Time”, p.49, Google Publishing

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• The world is still new . . . it seems old to us, but only seems because our lives are so short . . . our human race has been around for such a brief amount of time that the universe hasn't had the chance to detect us yet. One blink is all it needs to miss our dance through actuality.

  Carlton Mellick III

  Race, Missing, Needs

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• If you are deemed insane, then all actions that would oherwise prove you are not do, in actuality, fall into the framework of an insane person’s actions. Your sound protests constitute denial. Your valid fears are deemed paranoia. Your survival instincts are labeled defense mechanisms. It’s a no-win situation. It’s a death penalty really.

  Dennis Lehane

  Fall, Winning, Insane Person

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• Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.

  Charles Bukowski

  Real, Sadness, Inability

  Charles Bukowski (2015). “On Writing”, p.132, Canongate Books

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• The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. . . Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Real, Frustration, Vanity

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