Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make; I can only undo, unmake.

At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.

Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.

What is life without incompatible realities?

It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.

No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.

George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.

Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.

Spare yourself from seeking love, approval, or appreciation-from anyone. And watch what happens in reality, just for fun.

Reality doesn't wait for your opinion, vote, or permission, sweetheart. It just keeps being what it is and doing what it does.

When you srgue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.

The opening to reality, as it really is, is beauty.

When we stop opposing reality, action becomes simple, fluid, kind, and fearless.

I realized that it's insane to oppose it. When I argue with reality, I lose-but only 100% of the time. How do I know that the wind should blow? It's blowing!

If you want reality to be different than it is, you might as well try to teach a cat to bark.

Insanity is arguing with reality.

Arguing with reality it like trying to teach a cat to bark.

To argue with reality is to argue with God

The Work is merely four questions; it's not even a thing. It has no motive, no strings. It's nothing without your answers. These four questions will join any program you've got ad enhance it. Any religion you have-they'll enhance it. If you have no religion, they will bring you joy. And they'll burn up anything that isn't true for you. They'll burn through to the reality that has always been waiting.

Reality is always the story of a past, and what I love about the past is—it's over.

Nothing terrible has ever happened except in our thinking. Reality is always good, even in situations that seem like nightmares. The story we tell is the only nightmare that we have lived.