A Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.
We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.
The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.
I was in love with the idea of love, so I created elaborate fictions for my relationships - fictions that allowed me to believe that what any given paramour and I shared looked a lot like love.
My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.
Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.
Even the most scientific investigator in science, the most thoroughgoing Positivist, cannot dispense with fiction; he must at least make use of categories, and they are already fictions, analogical fictions, or labels, which give us the same pleasure as children receive when they are told the "name" of a thing.
The truly unique trait of 'Sapiens' is our ability to create and believe fiction. All other animals use their communication system to describe reality. We use our communication system to create new realities. Of course, not all fictions are shared by all humans, but at least one has become universal in our world, and this is money.
You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.
I never understood society. i undersand that it works somehow and that it functions as a reality and that its realities are necessary to keep us from worse realities. but all i sense are that are plenty of police and jails and judges and laws and that what is meant to protect me is breaking me down.
External realities - worlds of politics, economics, law, war, interpersonal and social relations - are part of prose fiction. Fiction also includes the realities of a character's interior language. Poetry can encompass the same realities, but in compressed, intensified language, which creates entirely different degrees of emotional force.
In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie.
Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract
The world is filled with invisible realities. But, if people do not see or hear, then these realities do not exist.
New Jack City' and 'Boyz 'N the Hood' are realities, but movies like 'Strictly Business' are realities, too.
'New Jack City' and 'Boyz 'N the Hood' are realities, but movies like 'Strictly Business' are realities, too.
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