Stark Reality Quotes

While the culture is constantly focused on fluff and positivity, God's Word offers not just a competing worldview but a contrary one. The Bible is not some retouched photo of the human condition, sanitized to save everyone the heartache of reality. The Bible brings far more than a smiley preacher with platitudes that fade before sunset. The Scriptures bring stark reality, the depravity of the human heart apart from God. His Word declares the dangers of sin using the lives of men and women who needed a front-row seat to learn that all sin brings suffering. These real people are not presented to us as perfect but as those whom God was working on. ~ James MacDonald

Fiction may amuse us, but reality instills lessons to be imbibed through experience; to 'live' this stark reality called 'life' as a blessing, whereas some foolishly waste it by following fiction and fictitious characters. ~ Henrietta Newton Martin

If you love a person, you love him in his stark reality, and refuse to shut your eyes to his defects and errors. ~ John Macmurray

To deal with the stark reality of having hit or hurt a woman or child, to deal with the initial responsibility you have not to do that and the knowledge you did do it, can be incredibly hard. ~ David Soul

The wild, unrestricted love of God is not simply an inspiring idea. When it imposes itself on mind and heart with the stark reality of ontological truth, it determines why and at what time you get up in the morning, how you pass your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, and who you hang with; it affects what breaks your heart, what amazes you, and what makes your heart happy. ~ Brennan Manning

'The HoneyLine' is my web site and TV segments that were birthed out of the stark reality that we all need a few people to help navigate this life. ~ Gabrielle Reece

The stark reality is that crime happens in communities of color. ~ Raymond Kelly

Silvia, with her long gorgeous hair sprawled across the pillow, was the most beautiful creature I'd ever seen. Her breasts bunched up like they were stuck in a corset made by Derek's weight, the good bits hidden by his muscular arm. I'd gotten more than an eyeful in the mystical aura of the Blood Stone, but craved to see if she was really that perfect in the stark reality of dawn. Derek closed his eyes, settling around his wife with a satisfied sigh and his arm slipped. My heart leapt and I bit my lip. Yep. Definitely perfect.

J.M. Friedman. Succubus in Seattle (Kindle Locations 1050-1054). ~ J.R. Thorn

But morning casts a harsh light over things, and the stark reality is that some things are easier to walk away from than to lose forever. But that doesn't mean that this doesn't hurt. ~ Andyoureturntome

To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion. ~ Daniel Gilbert

The stark reality facing us today is that without the labour reforms, workers will get neither the income nor jobs in the face of cut-throat global economic competition. ~ Kim Young-sam

You are so part of the world
that your slightest action contributes to its reality.
Your breath changes the atmosphere.
Your encounters with others
alter the fabrics of their lives,
and the lives of those
who come in contact with them. ~ Jane Roberts

Most children, even very bright ones, need constant review and practice to truly own a concept in grammar, math or science. In schools today, on paper it may appear that kids are learning skills, but in reality they are only renting them, soon to forget what they've learned over the weekend or summer vacation. ~ Rafe Esquith

I didn't know who I was any longer, so I just was. ~ John Duover

I contend that financial markets never reflect the underlying reality accurately; they always distort it in some way or another and the distortions find expression in market prices. Those distortions can, occasionally, find ways to affect the fundamentals that market prices are supposed to reflect. ~ George Soros

Cinema is a reflection of reality.
But you will feel things that you want to Existentially. ~ Pradeesh

I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be a superstar. I wanted to be on stage. I wanted to perform. I wanted to be in movies. But as you grow up, those dreams kind of fade away, and you're hit with reality, and you're like, 'Oh, not everyone can be Lil' Bow Wow?' Fine. ~ Lilly Singh

First accept the reality that we are all prejudiced because we have things and issues we have biases towards or against, based on our beliefs, thoughts and experiences. Accept that it is possible to differ on opinions, beliefs and philosophies without necessarily becoming inhumane or acrimonious towards each other. ~ Archibald Marwizi

Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love o fidelity. It is the foundations that underlies and gives reality to all other virtue and personal values. (p. 13) ~ Rollo May

Peabody waved her PPC triumphantly. "It's the Kirk thing, The Enterprise thing. It reminded me I'd hit this name that made me snicker when I was running the van - the Cargo. Here it is. Tony Stark."
"Oh, baby." McNab blew her a double-handed kiss. "Good call."
"It's gotta be, right?" Peabody said to McNab. "It's his style."
"Who the hell is Tony Stark?" Eve demanded.
"Iron Man," Roarke told her. "Superhero, genius, innovative engineer, and billionaire playboy."
"Iron Man? You're talking about a comic book guy?"
"Graphic novel," Roarke and McNab said together. ~ J.D. Robb

What is life without incompatible realities? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality; and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities. ~ John Fowles

In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' - and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root. ~ Roland Barthes

If God is a reality, and the soul is a reality, and you are an immortal being, what are you doing with your Bible shut? ~ Herrick Johnson

One realizes that everything about the world that seems so unexceptional and drearily predictable is in fact charged with an immense and imponderable mystery. In that instant one is aware, even if the precise formulation eludes one, that everything one knows exists in an irreducibly gratuitous way: "what it is" has no logical connection with the reality "that it is"; nothing within experience has any "right" to be, any power to give itself existence, any apparent "why." The world is unable to provide any account of its own actuality, and yet there it is all the same. In that instant one recalls that one's every encounter with the world has always been an encounter with an enigma that no merely physical explanation can resolve. One cannot dwell indefinitely ~ David Bentley Hart

Regardless of the truth - your perspecitve is your reality, unfortunately there may not be anyone else with the same perspective. ~ Larry Sheridan

THE PRICE grew out of a need to reconfirm the power of the past, the seedbed of current reality, and the way to possibly reaffirm cause and effect in an insane world. ~ Arthur Miller

A true leader is one who accepts defeat in the same way he accepts winning. ~ Abdulazeez Henry Musa

You're imprisoned within a self that doesn't feel wholly yours...But also, to you that self often feels deeply contaminated."
I nodded.
"But you give your thoughts too much power, Aza. Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don't."
"But your thoughts are you. I think therefore I am, right?"
"No, not really. A fuller formation of Descartes's philosophy would be Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. 'I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.' Descartes wanted to know if you could really know that anything was real, but he believed his ability to doubt reality proved that, while it might not be real, he was. You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less. ~ John Green

The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer ... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography ... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill. ~ John Loengard

The space within becomes the reality of the building. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

But life does not consist of words.
Life consists of reality. ~ Bjornstjerne Bjornson

Monotheism owes its existence not to philosophic speculation about the nature of reality or knowledge or virtue, but to acceptance of reality identified with a supreme being. ~ Israel Shenker

My whole art is based on escaping life and reality, which might not the best tendency to have when you're trying to be a good person in general. But people can escape into my world easily - artists are supposed to create a keyhole that people can look into. ~ Lykke Li

Whatever doesn't kill them, makes them make reality TV shows ... ~ Glen Duncan

For sure we live in a youth-obsessed culture that is constantly trying to tell us that if we're not young and glowing and "hot," we don't matter. But I refuse to buy into such a distorted view of reality. And I would never lie about or deny my age. To do so is to contribute to a sickness pervading our society - the sickness of wanting to be what you're not. I know for sure that only by owning who and what you are can you step into the fullness of life. I feel sorry for anyone who buys into the myth that you can be what you once were. The way to your best life isn't denial. It's owning every moment and staking a claim to the here and now. You're not the same woman you were a decade ago; if you're lucky, you're not the same woman you were last year. The whole point of aging, as I see it, is change. If we let them, our experiences can keep teaching us about ourselves. I celebrate that. Honor it. Hold it in reverence. And I'm grateful for every age I'm blessed to become. ~ Oprah Winfrey

So let us be bold in our efforts and even bolder in our vision. Let us tell the story of an America becoming - of a nation breaking free from the limits of its own arrested development and transforming into the place we were told about in school but which never really existed as such. Just because that place has been a cruel and taunting mirage for so long does not mean we cannot mold it into a reality. As the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) - one of the premier civil rights groups of our nation's history - used to say, Come, let us build a new world together. ~ Tim Wise

Sometimes you dream strange dreams, impossible and unnatural; you wake up and remember them clearly, and are surprised at a strange fact: you remember first of all that reason did not abandon you during the whole course of your dream; you even remember that you acted extremely cleverly and logically for that whole long, long time when you were surrounded by murderers, when they were being clever with you, concealed their intentions, treated you in a friendly way, though they already had their weapons ready and were only waiting for some sort of sign; you remember how cleverly you finally deceived them, hid from them; then you realize that they know your whole deception by heart and merely do not show you that they know where you are hiding; but you are clever and deceive them again - all that you remember clearly. But why at the same time could your reason be reconciled with such obvious absurdities and impossibilities, with which, among other things, your dream was filled? Before your eyes, one of your murderers turned into a woman, and from a woman into a clever, nasty little dwarf - and all that you allowed at once, as an accomplished fact, almost without the least perplexity, and precisely at the moment when, on the other hand, your reason was strained to the utmost, displaying extraordinary force, cleverness, keenness, logic? Why, also, on awakening from your dream and entering fully into reality, do you feel almost every time, and occasionally with an extraordinary forc ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The star rigger's Flux: a higher-dimensional realm where reality and fantasy became strangely merged, where landscapes of the mind intersected with the real fabric of space, where space itself flowed and surged with movement - and where a rigger's skills could vault him across light-years, or send him spiraling to his death. ~ Jeffrey A. Carver

These days the American dream of home ownership has turned into a nightmare for millions of families. They wake every day to the reality of a horrible decline in the value of the home that has meant so much to them. ~ Mortimer Zuckerman

I don't create my images as visual equations to be solved, but rather, i create them as internal landscapes that the viewer can explore. I enjoy sharing the why behind the what, of my creations ... but my way, isn't the only way, to experience them. There is no correct way to interpret them. Perception is reality and yours may be different from mine and that's okay. ~ Jaeda DeWalt

Beyond the emotionalism and the obvious sense of relief on all sides, I think that there is a recognition that reality may intrude, that perhaps the steps ahead and the days ahead are going to be much more difficult than one expects. ~ Hanan Ashrawi

Chance encounters, the desire to watch, a visit from an unexpected stranger -- all of these things fall within a realm of normalcy. There is always a moment in stories like these, a fork in the road, when you wonder which path will be chosen. Will it end quietly, without incident, or will it move on to the next level? Here lies the difference between reality and imagination. ~ K. Kiker

Just take Germany and the suffering of Jews during and after the Second World War. It would be legal to ridicule and to laugh at this suffering, but since it was such a trauma on the European conscience, no one is going to do it. It is an open scar, an open wound, an open reality. ~ Tariq Ramadan

I have dedicated my life to a doomed struggle against reality and the things that cannot be otherwise ~ Plamen Chetelyazov

In an incomprehensible reversal of all righteous and pious thinking, God declares himself guilty to the world and thereby extinguishes the guilt of the world. God himself takes the humiliating path of reconciliation and thereby sets the world free. God wants to be guilty of our guilt and takes upon himself the punishment and suffering that this guilt brought to us. God stands in for godlessness, love stands in for hate, the Holy One for the sinner. Now there is no longer any godlessness, any hate, any sin that God has not taken upon himself, suffered, and atoned for. Now there is no more reality and no more world that is not reconciled with God and in peace. That is what God did in his beloved Son Jesus Christ. Ecce homo - see the incarnate God, the unfathomable mystery of the love of God for the world. God loves human beings. God loves the world - not ideal human beings but people as they are, not an ideal world but the real world. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I am not afraid of beauty, unlike most artists today. The pollen, the milk, the beeswax, they have a beauty that is incredible, that is beyond the imagination, something which you cannot believe is a reality-and it is the most real. I could not make it myself, I could not create it myself, but I can participate in it. Trying to create it yourself is only a tragedy, participating in it is a big chance. ~ Wolfgang Laib

The human brain runs first-class simulation software. Our eyes don't present to our brains a faithful photograph of what is out there, or an accurate movie of what is going on through time. Our brains construct a continuously updated model: updated by coded pulses chattering along the optic nerve, but constructed nevertheless. Optical illusions are vivid reminders of this.47 A major class of illusions, of which the Necker Cube is an example, arise because the sense data that the brain receives are compatible with two alternative models of reality. The brain, having no basis for choosing between them, alternates, and we experience a series of flips from one internal model to the other. The picture we are looking at appears, almost literally, to flip over and become something else. ~ Richard Dawkins

I do try to write in ways that reflect reality, and I think that reality is rarely simple. ~ Rebecca Stead

Skypilot could not help but hope that the song of the moon
the song of God's miraculous firmament
might reach her tonight and enable her to feel the reality of Christ's love and sacrifice. ~ Serena B. Miller

For some natures learn with greater difficulty and after greater delay than others, that the real importances of our existence are the nothingnesses of every-day life, the nothingnesses which the philosopher in his study, reasoning about and analyzing human character, is apt to overlook; but which, nevertheless, make him and everyone else more of a human reality and less of an abstraction. ~ Beatrice Harraden

Most people don't inhabit a living reality, but a conceptualized one. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Somehow I have managed to delay looking old. In reality I have good genes. ~ Michael Schumacher

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. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

It turns out people don't listen to each other very much. Once someone feels listened to, they can't stop talking. ~ Kio Stark

We have relinquished and abandoned and left behind and forgotten what we believed we had to relinquish, abandon and leave behind and ultimately forget; we have let ourselves go and we have gone away and we have gone under, but we have relinquished nothing and abandoned nothing and left behind nothing and forgotten nothing; we have in reality extinguished nothing whatsoever, because our parents did not inform us of or enlighten us about the fact that our life-process is in reality nothing but a process of illness. We were up above, in the company of our parents, locked up in our walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us was nothing but lethal and we are down below, without our parents, again locked up in these walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us is nothing but lethal. ~ Thomas Bernhard

Every thought has the power to bring into being the visible from the invisible. It is absolutely necessary for us all to understand that everything we think, do or say comes back to us. Every thought, word or action- without exception- manifests itself [in some way] as an actual reality. ~ Ann Wigmore